No More Learning

These are entertaining
Earl Brand, however, like Babylon, like the Scandi-
navian versions, is tragic in the matter; although a closely related
ballad, Erlinton, killing fifteen of the pursuers, spares the father,
and lets the lovers go off happy to the greenwood. Lady Isabel,
too, escapes by whatever stratagem from her savage wooer; and
here, of course, are borrowed motives, as in the 'three cries' for
help. There is a glimpse, too, of supernatural aid, as, in some
versions, that of the talking birds. In a ballad of similar theme, but
quite prosaic details, The Fair Flower of Northumberland, it is
hard to say whether the supernatural elements have been toned
down or lost, or else were never in the piece at all. Among other
elopement stories of the primitive sort, mainly situation but with
a few romantic details, Gil Brenton, a sterling old ballad, is
worthy of note; the type, however, easily passes into mere sen-
sation, into mawkish and cheap sentiment and into the rout of
tales about runaways fair or foul, mainly localised in Scotland.
There is even sadder stuff than this. Brown Robin, Willie and
Earl Richard's Daughter (purporting to account for the birth of
Robin Hood), Rose the Red and White Lily, The Famous Flower
of Serving Men and Tim Potts, are a descending series with very
low fall. The singing-robes of balladry are here in rags, and tawdry
rags too. There is recovery of old traditions, however, in the
Scottish ballads of bride-stealing or elopement like Katharine
Jaffray_whether Scott's own doing, or compiled from traditional
fragments, in any case the model of his Young Lochinvar-and in
like pieces of varying merit, Bonny Baby Livingston, Eppie
Morrie and The Lady of Arngosk—the last named known in many
of its details, both as an event about 1736 and as a popular song,
but unfortunately recovered only in fragments. Very different,
finally, is the tone of two good ballads, Willie's Lyke-Wake and
The Gay Goshawk, where love finds out the way by stratagem and
inspires robust verse of the old kind.
Complications of kin make up ballads of domestic tragedy,
a most important group; and even the inroads of a doggerel poet
upon the old material, even the cheap 'liturature of the stalls,
cannot hide that ancient dignity. The motive of Bewick and
Graham, outwardly a story of two drunken squires near Carlisle,
their quarrel, and the sacrifice of two fine lads to this quarrel in
the conflict of filial duty with ties of friendship-told, by the way,
in verse that often touches the lowest levels-redeems the ballad


## p. 412 (#430) ############################################

412
Ballads
from its degraded form and gives it the pathos of a Cid. The cry
of the dying victor-
Father, could yo not drunk your wine at home,
And letten me and my brother be?
a
>
is not impressive, perhaps, as a quotation ; but in its context and
climax it stands with the great things of the great poems. Andrew
Lammie, enormously popular in the north of Scotland, represents
another class of homely ballads, more or less vulgarised by their
form, their overdone sentiment and their efforts at literary grace,
but not without appeal and a certain force of tradition. Tradition
at its purest, and an appeal to which few readers fail in respond-
ing, characterise the great ballads of domestic tragedy. Edward,
for example, is so inevitable, so concentrated, that sundry critics,
including the latest editor of Scott's Minstrelsy, would refer it
to art; but tradition can bring about these qualities in its own
way. Lord Randal, with its bewildering number of versions;
Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, a favourite in Shakespeare's
day and often quoted ; Glasgerion (who may be the 'Glascurion
mentioned in Chaucer's House of Fame and may represent the
Welsh Glas Keraint), a simple but profoundly affecting ballad on a
theme which no poet could now handle without either constraint or
offence; Child Maurice; The Cruel Brother; The Twa Brothers
with a particularly effective climax-offer tragedy of the false
mistress, the false wife, the false servant, and tragedy of more
complicated matter. Wives false and wives true are pictured in two
sterling Scottish ballads, The Baron o' Brackley and Captain Car,
both founded on fact. The Braes o' Jarrow knew another faithful
wife. Darker shadows of incest, mainly avoided by modern litera-
ture, fall in possibility on Babylon, quoted above, and in real
horror upon Sheath and Knife and Lizie Wan. The treacherous
nurse, again, with that bloody and revengeful Lamkin-a satiric
name-long frightened Scottish children; and a case of treachery
in higher station, involving trial by combat and giving many hints
of medieval ways, is preserved in the old story of Sir Aldingar,
familiar to William of Malmesbury. Finally, there is the true-
love. The adjective is beautifully justified in The Three Ravens,
unfortunately less known than its cynical counterpart, The Tua
Corbies. True love is false in Young Hunting ; and fickle lovers
come to grief in Lord Lovel, Fair Margaret and Sweet William,
and Lord Thomas and Fair Annet. Fate, not fickleness,
however, brings on the tragedy in Fair Janet, Lady Maisey,


## p. 413 (#431) ############################################

Child Waters
413
Clerk Saunders; while fickleness is condoned and triumphant in
ballads which Child calls 'pernicious': The Broom o Cowden
knowes and The Wylie Wife of the Hie Toun Hie. Better is the
suggestion of The Wife of Bath's Tale in the popular Knight
and Shepherds Daughter. Child Waters, which both Child and
Grundtvig praise as the pearl of English ballads, belongs to the
well known group of poems celebrating woman's constancy under
direst provocation; neither Chaucer's Clerk's Tale nor that
dramatic poem of the Nut Brown Maid pleads the cause of
woman with more eloquence. Ellen in the stable, with her new-
born child, appeals to any heart:
Lullabye, my oune deere child !
Lullabye, deere child, deere!
I wold thy father were a king,
Thy mother layd on a beere!
While this ballad has wandered far from the dramatic and choral
type, the survival in its structure is marked enough; and its
incremental repetition, in several sequences, is most effective.
Ballads of the funeral, echoes of the old coronach, vocero,
whatever the form of communal grief, are scantily preserved in
English; Bonnie James Campbell and The Bonny Earl of Murray
may serve as types; but the noblest outcome of popular lament,
however crossed and disguised by elements of other verse it may
seem in its present shape, is Sir Patrick Spens, which should be
read in the shorter version printed by Percy in the Reliques, and
should not be teased into history. The incremental repetition and
climax of its concluding stanzas are beyond praise. Less affecting
is the 'good night'-unless we let Johnny Armstrong, beloved
of Goldsmith, pass as strict representative of this type. Lord
Maxwell's Last Good Night, it is known, suggested to Byron
the phrase and the mood of Childe Harold's song. To be a
ballad, however, these 'good nights' must tell the hero's story,
not simply echo his emotion.
Superstition, the other world, ghost-lore, find limited scope in
English balladry. Two ballads of the sea, Bonnie Annie and
Broun Robyn's Confession, make sailors cast lots to find the 'fey
folk' in the ship, and so to sacrifice the victim. Commerce with
the other world occurs in Thomas Rymer, derived from a romance,
and in Tam Lin, said by Henderson to be largely the work of
Burns. Clerk Colvill suffers from his alliance with a mermaid.
The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry, a mournful little ballad from
Shetland, tells of him who is 'a man upo' the lan',' but a seal,


## p. 414 (#432) ############################################

414
Ballads
'a silkie in the sea. ' Other transformation ballads are Kemp
Owyme, Allison Gross and The Laily Worm. In Sweet William's
Ghost, however, a great favourite of old, and in the best of
all 'supernatural' ballads, The Wife of Usher's Well, dignified,
pathetic, reticent, English balladry competes in kind, though by no
means in amount, with the riches of Scandinavian tradition.
Epic material of every sort was run into the ballad mould.
King Orfeo finds Eurydice in Shetland; the ballad is of very old
structural type. Sacred legends like that of Sir Hugh, and
secular legends such as Hind Horn, occur; while Sir Cawline and
King Estmere are matter of romance. Possibly, the romances of
Europe sprang in their own turn from ballads ; and Sir Lionel, in
the Percy folio, with its ancient type of structure, may even
reproduce the kind of ballads which formed a basis for Sir Cawline
itself. Minstrels, of course, could take a good romance and make
it over into indifferent ballads; three of these are so described by
Child—The Boy and the Mantle, King Arthur and King Corn-
wall and The Marriage of Sir Gawaine. With the cynical Crow
and Pie we reach the verge of indecency, also under minstrel
patronage, though it is redeemed for balladry by a faint waft of
tradition. This piece, along with The Baffled Knight and The
Broomfield Hill, is close to the rout from which Tom D'Urfey
selected his Pills to Purge Melancholy. Thoroughly debased is
The Keach in the Creel; but The Jolly Beggar, especially in the
'old lady's' manuscript, is half-redeemed by the dash and swing
of the lines. Old ladies, as one knows from a famous anecdote
of Scott, formerly liked this sort of thing, without losing caste, and
saw no difference between it and the harmless fun of Get Up and
Bar the Door, or the old story, which Hardy seems to record as
still a favourite in Dorsetshire, of Queen Eleanor's Confession.
With this ballad we come to history, mainly perverted, but
true as tradition. Lord Delamere, debased in broadsides, Hugh
Spencer's Feats in France and the vastly popular John Dory;
naval ballads like the poor Sweet Trinity and the excellent
Sir Andrew Barton; Scottish King James and Brown, and
that sterling ballad Mary Hamilton which Andrew Lang has
successfully called back from Russia to its place at queen Mary's
own court, with twenty-eight versions still extant to attest its
vogue-all these are typical in their kind. But the historical
ballad, recited rather than sung epic in all its purposes and
details, and far removed from the choral ballad of dramatic
situation, is best studied in those pieces which have become
a


## p. 415 (#433) ############################################

The Historical Ballad
415
traditional along the Scottish border. Not all, however, are of
the chronicle type. In 1593, a certain freebooter was hanged, and
his nephew took good vengeance for him, calling out a ballad;
whatever its original shape, one finds it still fresh with the impres-
sion of actual deeds; and, in its nervous couplets, its lack of
narrative breadth, the lilt and swing of it, one is inclined to call
The Lads of Wamphray a case of ipsi confingunt—a phrase of
which Leslie was making use, not far from this date, as to the
Borderers and their songs. The dialogue is immediate, and has
the old incremental repetition :
O Simmy, Simmy, now let me gang,
And I vow I'll ne'er do a Crichton wrang.
O Simmy, Simmy, now let me be,
And a peck o' goud I'll gio to thee.
O Simmy, Simmy, let me gang,
And my wife shall heap it wi' her hand.
This was not made at long range. Epic, on the other hand, and
reminiscent, is Dick o' the Cow-cited by Tom Nashe-a good
story told in high spirits ; long as it is, it has a burden, and was
meant to be sung. Archie o' Cawfield, Hobie Noble, Jock o' the
Side and others of the same sort are narratives in the best
traditional style ; Scott's imitation of these is Kinmont Willie-
at least it is so much his own work as to deserve to bear his name.
Still another class is the short battle-piece, of which Harlaw,
Bothwell Bridge and even Flodden Field, preserved by Delmey,
may serve as examples. Durham Field, in sixty-six stanzas, was
made by a minstrel. Refusing classification, there stand out those
two great ballads, probably on the same fight, Cheviot and Otter-
burn. The version of the former known as Chevy Chace, 'written
over for the broadside press,' as Child remarks, was the object
of Addison’s well known praise ; what Sidney heard as 'trumpet
sound' is not certain, but one would prefer to think it was the
old Cheviot. One would like, too, the liberty of bringing Shake-
speare into the audience, and of regarding that ancient ballad as
contributing to his conception of Hotspur. These are no spinsters'
songs, but rather, in the first instance at least, the making and the
tradition of men-at-arms. A curiously interlaced stanza arrange-
ment, here and there to be noted in both the old Cheviot and
Otterburn, as well as Richard Sheale's signature to the former as
part of his minstrel stock, imply considerable changes in the
structure of the original ballad. Sheale, of course, had simply
copied a favourite song; but the fact is suggestive.
6


## p. 416 (#434) ############################################

416
Ballads
a
Last of all, the greenwood. Johnie Cock, says Child, is
'a precious specimen of the unspoiled traditional ballad. ' A
single situation and event, it contrasts sharply with a long
story like Adam Bell as well as with the various pieces, short
or long, which deal with Robin himself. From Johnie Cock to
the Gest is a process of great interest to the student of traditional
verse. Had the Gest, indeed, been made by its humble rhapsode
in an unlettered age, the epic process would have had even more
scope, and would have drawn upon poetic sources already claimed
for deliberate composition and the literary record. As it is, Robin
may be proud of his place. ‘Absolutely a creation of the ballad
muse,' he is the hero of a sterling little epic, and of thirty-six
extant individual ballads, good and bad ; the good are mainly
of a piece with the old epic material, and the bad are indebted
for their badness to the corruptions of the broadside press, the
editing for garlands and the exhausted vitality of late tradition.
Robin has a definite personality throughout, though the degenerate
ballads, as in the case of late poems about Charlemagne, make
him anybody's victim. Any local hero could be exalted by the
simple process of outwitting and trouncing the old master of that
craft. One of the latest poems, a dreary compilation called the
True Tale of Robin Hood, the only piece in Child's collection
which is not anonymous, is the work of Martin Parker. But
one forgets trash. Robin remains as the best ballads and the
Gest have drawn him-generous, brave, pious, with a touch of
melancholy and a touch of humour unknown to the strictly choral
а
The narrative art of this good verse is very high. No
story is better told anywhere than the story of Robin's loan to
Sir Richard and its payment; humour is held firmly in hand ;
and Chaucer himself could not better the ease and sureness of
the little epic. Nor does the Gest improve in all ways upon its
material. Robin Hood and the Monk is a sterling piece of
narrative. The brief close of the Gest, telling, in five stanzas, how
Robin was “beguiled' and slain, and rather awkwardly quoting
an unconnected bit of dialogue, should be compared with the
ballad of Robin Hood's Death from the Percy folio. Here, in
spite of eighteen missing stanzas, the story is admirably told.
Every incident counts: the testy humour of Robin at the start,
the mysterious old woman banning him as she kneels on the plank
over 'black water, the fatal bleeding, the final struggle, revenge,
pious parting and death-good narrative throughout. It is clear
that a process had taken place in the gradual formation of this
muse.


## p. 417 (#435) ############################################

Ballad Sources
417
cycle which not only brought its several parts into fair coherence,
but, also, exercised a reactionary influence upon tradition itself.
In any case, with these ballads of Robin Hood, balladry itself
crossed the marches of the epic, and found itself far from the
old choral, dramatic improvisations, though still fairly close to
the spirit and motive of traditional verse.
A word remains to be said on the sources and the values
of British ballads as a whole. Common 'Aryan' origin, though
it was still held in a modified form by Gaston Paris, can no longer
be maintained so as to account for the community of theme
in the ballads of Europe. What has been done by scholars like
Child and Grundtvig, by Nigra, Bugge and others, is to have
established certain groups, more or less definite, which, in different
lands and times, tell the same general story or give the same
particular motive or detail. To account for these groups is an-
other task. A pretty little ballad from Shetland narrates in quite
choral, dramatic form the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Bugge
has traced the same story from a Danish ballad far back into
medieval times ; its ultimate source, to be sure, is the classical
account. Another source, we have seen, is legend; still another
is the direct historical event. Evidently, then, the matter of
sources is something to be settled for the narrative part of each
individual ballad; but, however great the interest of this investi-
gation may be, however obvious its claims and satisfactory its
results, it does not affect the specific ballad as a literary form.
The structure of the ballad—what makes it a species, the elements
of it-derives from choral and dramatic conditions ; what gives it
its peculiar art of narrative is the epic process working by oral
tradition, and gradually leading to a new structure with choral
and dramatic elements still surviving, though dwindling, in the
,
guise of refrain and incremental repetition. The metrical form
remains fairly constant throughout. With certain other formal
characteristics, the commonplaces, the conventional phrases and
motives, there is no space to deal here. So, too, with regard to
imitations good and bad, we can only refer to Scott's Kinmont
Willie for one class, and, for the other, to that famous forgery,
the Hardycnute of Lady Wardlaw.
The aesthetic values of the ballad call for no long comment.
They are the values which attach to rough, strong verse intent
upon its object. Scope and figure are out of the question, and all
feats of language as such. No verborum artifex works here. The
appeal is straight. It is, indeed, ridiculous to call the ballads
27
E. L. II.
CH, XVII.


## p. 418 (#436) ############################################

418
Ballads
'primitive'; not only have they a developed art of their own, but
they are crossed at every turn by literary influences, mainly work-
ing for coherence of narrative, which are indirect, indeed, yet sure.
Nevertheless, the abiding value of the ballads is that they give a
hint of primitive and unspoiled poetic sensation. They speak not
only in the language of tradition, but also with the voice of the
multitude; there is nothing subtle in their working, and they
appeal to things as they are. From one vice of modern literature
they are free: they have no 'thinking about thinking,' no feeling
about feeling. They can tell a good tale. They are fresh with the
open air ; wind and sunshine play through them; and the dis-
tinction, old as criticism itself, which assigns them to nature rather
than to art, though it was overworked by the romantic school and
will be always liable to abuse, is practical and sound.


## p. 419 (#437) ############################################

CHAPTER XVIII
POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS VERSE TO THE CLOSE
OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY-FINAL WORDS
In a previous chapter), something was said of the changes in
language and in thought which accompanied the Norman conquest
of England, and it was pointed out how short a time, comparatively
speaking, was needed for the fusion of race with race. The
incorporation of a French vocabulary into the vernacular was,
inevitably, a more prolonged operation; or, to speak more precisely,
it was longer before that fusion became apparent and was reflected
in the literature of the people, the literary or fashionable language
being, for many a long year, the tongue of the conquerors. The
influence of the courtly literature of the ruling caste in more
than one direction has already been pointed out? It is no part
of the scope of this work to encroach upon what more properly
belongs to the earlier literature of a modern language other than
our own, or to tell over again what has already been dealt
with in the pages of Gaston Paris, in the volumes of Petit de
Julleville and elsewhere; but our interest in medieval French
letters must always be more than that of mere neighbours. Thus,
the period now reached in the history of our own literature, when the
death of Gower points, approximately, to the end of French letters
in England, offers an opportunity for mentioning, in the course
of a very brief summary, the work of one or two Anglo-Normans
whose writings either are intimately connected with English
historical events and personages, or have left their impression
on the form and matter of the rapidly growing body of vernacular
literature. To some of these, special reference has already been
made-Philippe de Thaon, whose Bestiarybelongs to a popular
and fascinating type of didactic literature, and helped to furnish
1 Vol. 1, pp. 149 ff.
2 Vol. 1, chapter XII. See also vol. 1, pp. 238, 446, 447, 460, 466 ff.
3 Dedicated to Adela of Louvain, the second wife of Henry I, for whom Benoit
the Anglo-Norman monk versified a St Brendan in 1121.
27-2


## p. 420 (#438) ############################################

420
Political and Religious Verse
material for early English writers on similar themes, and whose
guide to the ecclesiastical calendar, Li Cumpoz, sets forth what
the ignorant clerk ought to know; Geoffrey Gaimar and Wace, who
became the mediums by which earlier English and Latin histories
provided material for the work of Layamon; William of Wadington,
whose Manuel was written, probably, for Normans in Yorkshire,
and another ‘Yorkshire Norman,' Peter of Langtoft, who were the
literary god-fathers of Mannyng of Brunne! .
Gaimar's Estorie des Engles was based, mainly, on the Old
English Chronicle and, apart from his relation to Layamon,
his chief value for us lies in the sections which deal with
contemporary matters, in his contributions to the story of
Havelok and in his descriptions of social manners and customs? .
Of greater worth is the life of William Marshal, first earl of
Pembroke and Striguil, regent of England, a soldier and states-
man who died in 1219, after having served, for nearly half a century,
more than one king of England with rare fidelity, and whose
deeds are worthily enshrined in the poem which bears his name.
L'Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, which was finished in 1226,
consists of some 19,000 octosyllabic lines, and its discoverer,
Paul Meyer, has claimed for it a place in the front rank of
French medieval historiography, and as having no superiors in its
kind in the writings of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries S.
Garnier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence's Vie de St Thomas Becket, a
poem worthy of its subject, and of great historic value; Fantosme's
Chronicle of the Scottish Wars of 1173–4; Ambroise's Histoire
de la Guerre Sainte, with Richard Cour de Lion for its central
figure; Old French psalters and saints' lives ; moral tales, like
those told by the Franciscan Nicole Bozon in the earlier half of
the fourteenth century; immoral fables ; pilgrimages and gospels
for the laity; popular presentations of current science and works
on venery, such as those which probably served the somewhat
mythical Juliana Berners; lais, as those of Marie de France
-all these may be recorded as links in the direct chain which
bound French medieval literature to England. To these may be
added books of counsel and courtesy, which became models for
and directly inspired the popular literature of the native tongue
—“the booke,' for example, 'whiche the knyght of the Toure
i Vol. 1, pp. 104, etc. , 170, etc. , 204, etc. , 226 ff. , 344 ff. , 447, 460, etc. , etc.
2 See, for example, in Wright, T. , A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments
in England during the Middle Ages, pp. 84, etc.
* L'Hist. de Guillaume le Maréchal, ed. P. Meyer, t. in, p. cii, Paris, 1901.


## p. 421 (#439) ############################################

The Vows of the Heron
421
made to the enseygnement and techyng of his doughters, translated
oute of Frenssh in to our maternall Englysshe tongue by me,
William Caxton'; dialogues, as those contained in a maniere de
langage que t'enseignera bien a droit parler et escrire doulz
françois', which help to make clearer to us the social relations
of the fourteenth century; and French versions of the old
romances such as Caxton and his followers popularised, to which
reference has already been made, and which will be further
discussed when the prose of the sixteenth century is under
consideration.
Political verse to the end, approximately, of the reign of
Edward II was glanced at in a previous chapter? In addition
to the two poems in the mixed languages therein mentioned, may
be noted a Song against the King's Taxes, written in the reign
of Edward II, in five-line stanzas, the first half of each line, save
the fifth, being in Anglo-Norman and the latter half of each line
and the whole of the fifth being in Latin. Its theme and its
form can best be seen by such a stanza as the following:
Depus que le roy vodera tam multum cepisse,
Entre les riches si purra satis invenisse ;
E plus, à ce que m'est avys, et melius fecisse
Des grantz partie aver pris, et parvis pepercisse.
Qui capit argentum sine causa peccat egentum 3.
From the reign of Edward III onwards, English, as the main
vehicle for political verse, apparently ousts Anglo-Norman. A late
Anglo-Norman poem, written about 1338, Leus veus du hairon,
The Vows of the Heron', has, for its object, the goading of the
young king Edward III to war with France, by comparing him
with what was held to be a cowardly bird. The poem relates
that Robert of Artois, who had his own purposes to serve, caused
a heron to be served at the king's table and called aloud the bird's
virtues and vices as it was carried in :
Et puis que couers est, je dis à mon avis,
C'au plus couart qui soit ne qui oncques fust vis
Donrrai le hairon, ch'est Edouart Loeis,
Deshiretes de Franche, le nobile pais,
Qu'il en estoit drois hoirs ; mès cuers li est falis,
Et por sa lasquethé en morra dessaisis ;
Sen dois bein au hairon voer le sien avis.
This is too much for the king; and he and his courtiers make their
warlike vows on the heron. The war that ensued, together with
1 See P. Meyer, Revue Critique, 1870, p. 871.
• Vol. , p. 370.
8 Wright, T. , Political Songs, 1839, p. 184.
• Political Poems and Songs, ed. Wright, T. , 1859, Rolls Series.


## p. 422 (#440) ############################################

422
Political and Religious Verse
the Scottish war of the earlier years of the boy-king's reign, were
sung by Laurence Minot; and the death of the king, in 1377, called
forth a tribute the overmastering thought in which was the very
old fashioned sentiment
That alle thing weres and wasteth away.
That the evils of the time were not absent from the minds of
thinking men we see by the writings of Gower and by the Plowman
poems. In these last, there is no room for the light hearted gaiety,
the easy-going happiness that causes us to regard Chaucer, though
a contemporary, as almost belonging to another world. To the
writers of the Plowman poems the times were out of joint and
more than jesting was required to set them right; their sharp
solemn rimeless lines ring in the ear like the sound of an alarm
or the first few strokes of the passing bell.
The unquiet reign of Henry IV saw the miserable game of heresy-
hunting at work under the statute De Heretico Comburendo,
and political revolt after revolt in the north. Four years after
the burning of William Sawtrey the Lollard, at Smithfield, a lay
court condemned the saintly archbishop Richard le Scrope of York
to death for high treason and provided that the sentence should
be carried out as ignominiously as might be. The virtues of the
archbishop are celebrated in Latin and in English verses; and the
political and religious crimes' of the Lollards are not forgotten by
other literary clerks.
Both Latin and English poems against the Lollards and songs
against friars, are of common occurrence. One poet sings
Thai dele with purses, pynnes and knyves,
With gyrdles, gloves, for wenches and wyves,
while another, in a fifteenth century MS, combines Latin and
English, beginning
Freeres, freeres, wo 30 be!
ministri malorum,
For many a manes soule bringe 30
ad poenas infernorum 3
and continuing, in violent lines which cannot be quoted, to set forth
current crimes. In the Middle Ages, popular singers, 'westours
and rimers, minstrels or vagabonds, who followed their calling
along the king's highway, helped, often enough, to fan the flames
i Political Poems and Songs, ed. Wright, T. , 1859, Rolls Series, vol. I, p. 215.
Ibid. p. 264.
Reliquiae Antiquae, ed. Wright, T. and Halliwell, J. O. , 1841–3, vol. 11, p. 247.
See also vol. I, p. 322.
3


## p. 423 (#441) ############################################

The Libel of English Policy 423
>
6
of rebellion, political and religious; it should be remembered to
their credit that, consciously or unconsciously, their work was
not without effect in the emancipation of the people.
Ten years after the 'Glory of York' had been executed, the
victory of Agincourt gave further employment to song writers;
but the specimen of their work preserved in the Pepysian MS
does not bear comparison with later poems on the same theme.
Professional and laudatory verses on deaths and coronations we
can leave aside; but the interest of its satire should preserve
from forgetfulness a poem on the siege of Calais, 1436. "The
duk of Burgayn,' with 'grete prid' set forth 'Calys to wyn,' and
his preparations are told with a rare spirit of raillery. In Calais
itself, even
The women, both yung and old,
Wyth stones stuffed every scaffold,
The spared not to swet ne swynk;
With boylyng cawdrens, both grett and smalle,
Yf they wold assaute the walle,
All hote to gev them drynki.
In 1436–7, was written one of the most important and re-
markable of early English political poems, The Libel [or little
book] of English Policy. The poem begins by 'exhortynge alle
Englande to kepe the see enviroun,' and it is an early example
of the political insight which recognised that the natural source of
the greatness of a small island lay on the sea ; its influence on
later naval developments can scarce be doubted. English com-
mercial relations with foreign nations are discussed by the
anonymous author at considerable length; "the commodytees
of Spayne and of Filaundres,' and of many another community are
reviewed, and oddly enough these things read in rime:
And lycorys, Syvyle oyle, and grayne,
Whyte Castelle sope, and was, is not in vayne;
Iren, wolle, wadmole, gotefel, kydefel also,
Ffor poynt-makers fulle nedefulle be the ij.
The Irish question is well to the fore, and there is a Welsh
question as well:
wyth alle your myghte take hede
To kepe Yrelond, that it be not loste;
Ffor it is a boterasse and a poste
Undre England, and Wales another.
God forbede but eche were othere brothere,
Of one ligeaunce dewe unto the kynge.
And then the author turns to discuss the comodius stokfysshe
of Yselonde' brought by the seamen that go out from Bristow
1 Political Poems, ed. Wright, T. , vol. 11, p. 151.


## p. 424 (#442) ############################################

424 Political and Religious Verse
and from Scarborowgh 'unto the costes cold'; and he harks back
to Calais and urges, in language which sounds strangely modern,
that there be
set a governaunce.
Set many wittes wythoutene variaunce
To one accorde and unanimité,
Put to god wylle for to kepe the see.
The ende of bataile is pease sikerlye,
And power causeth pease finally!
The last political poem to which reference need be made here is
a mocking dirge, called forth by the death of the king's favourite
the duke of Suffolk, on 3 May 1450, 'a dyrge made by the comons
of Kent in the tyme of ther rysynge when Jake Cade was theyr
cappitayn. . . writn owt of david norcyn his booke by John stowe? '
The poem describes how 'bisshopes and lordes, as grete reson is,'
took their several parts in his funeral service, and it deserves
mention by reason of the prosodic art shown in the refrain, ‘in
which the passing-bell slowness of the first half
6
For | Jack | Napes' | soul pla-1
suddenly turns head over heels into a carillon of satiric joy and
triumph with
cebo and I dirilge3! '
A careful examination of fourteenth century religious poems
preserved in the Vernon MS and elsewhere, of the minor verse of
the school of Richard Rolle of Hampole, of passages in the
religious plays such as those which tell the story of Abraham and
Isaac and of the fugitive verse of the fifteenth century should
convince the most sceptical of the wealth of early English anony-
mous poetry, and of its great prosodic interest; it should abolish
the practice of regarding verse associated with the outstanding
names, and the so-called 'court-poetry,' as the only poetry worth
consideration; and it should help us to render tardy justice to
periods sometimes dubbed barren wastes.
The note of simplicity of utterance, often combined with
1 The quotations are from T. Wright's text, in Political Poems and Songs, but see
also the first volume of Hakluys and The Libell of Englishe Policye, 1436, Text und
metrische Übersetzung von W. Hertzberg, Mit einer geschichtlichen Einleitung von R.
Pauli, Leipzig, 1878. Cf. also the poem On England's Commercial Policy, Wright's
Political Poems and Songs, vol. II, p. 282.
2 Political, Religious and Love Poems, Lambeth MS, etc. , ed. Farnivall, F. J. ,
E. E. T. S. 1866, new edition, 1903.
* Saintsbury, G. , A History of English Prosody, vol. I, p. 261.


## p. 425 (#443) ############################################

Lyrics and Carols
425
perfection of form, which is struck in such poems as the
thirteenth or early fourteenth century lyric from the Egerton MS
Somer is comen and winter is gon,
this day beginniz to longe,
And this foules everichon
joye hem wit songe!
So stronge kare me bint,
Al wit joye that is funde
in londe,
Al for a child
That is so milde
of hondel,
is found again in the Sayings of St Bernard in the Vernon MS
Where ben heo that biforen us weren,
That houndes ladden and haukes beeren,
And hedden feld and wode;
This Riche ladys in heore bour,
That wereden gold in heore tressour,
With heore brihte rode 237
It is carried on by Michael of Kildare, in a hymn written at the
beginning of the fourteenth century in which there are move-
ments like this:
This worldis love is gon 8-wai,
So dew on grasse in someris dai,
Few ther beth, weilawai!
that lovith Goddis lore";
it becomes exquisitely melodious in the northern Hampole poems
of, approximately, the middle of the fourteenth century, notably
in the alliterative verses beginning
My trewest tresowre sa trayturly taken,
Sa bytterly bondyn wyth bytand bandes;
How sone of thi servandes was thou forsaken,
And lathly for my lufe hurld with thair handes",
and in Eve's lines in the 'Coventry' play:
Alas! that evyr that speche was spokyn
That the fals aungel seyd onto me.
Alas! oure makers byddyng is brokyn
Ffor I have towchyd his owyn dere tre.
Oure filesely eyn byn al unlokyn,
Nakyd for synne ouresylf we see,
That sory appyl that we han sokyn
To dethe hathe brouth my spouse and mo®.
1 Reliquiae Antiquae, vol. 1, p. 100.
? complexion.
& Minor Poems of the Vernon MS, with poems from Digby MS, vol. 11, p. 521, ed.
Furnivall, F. J. , E. E. T. S. 1901.
* Reliquiae Antiquae, vol. 11, p. 190.
5 Horstman's ed. , vol. I, p. 72.
& Ludus Coventriae, ed. Halliwell, J. O. , pp. 27, 28, 1841.


## p. 426 (#444) ############################################

426
Political and Religious Verse
It exerts magical power in the beautiful carol from the early
fifteenth century Sloane MS :
I syng of a mayden that is makeles,
Kyng of alle kynges to here sone che ches.
He cam also stylle ther his moder was,
As dew in Aprylle that fallyt on the gras.
He cam also stylle to his moderes bowr,
As dew in Aprille that fallyt on the flour.
He cam also stylle ther his moder lay,
As dew in Aprille that fallyt on the sprayl;
it shows itself capable of infinite pathos in the appeal of Isaac to
his father in the Chester play:
Alas! father, is that your will,
Your owne childe here for to spill
Upon this hilles brynke?
Yf I have trespassed in any degree,
With a yard you maye beate me;
Put up your sword if your will be,
For I am but a Childe
Abraham
Come hither, my Child, that art so sweete;
Thou must be bounden hand and feetea;
it reveals passion, strong though subdued to that it works in,
in the Quia amore langueo of the Lambeth MS c. 14308; and it
finds an echo in the poem to the Virgin, printed towards the
close of the fifteenth century in Speculum Christiani, beginning
Mary moder, wel thou be!
Mary moder, thenke on me.
There are, of course, duller and more sophisticated utterances
than these. Mysticism often acts as a clog and didactic aim
frequently achieves its usual end and produces boredom. But
that happy sense of familiarity with the company of Heaven,
which is one of the characteristics of an age of profound faith,
finds delightful expression in hymns from Christ to His 'deintiest
damme'' and, above all, in the religious plays. These last,
which were written to be understood by the common folk, are
1 Songs and Carols, ed. Wright, T. , Warton Club, 1861, p. 30.
Chester Plays, ed. Deimling, H. , E. E. T. S. , 1893, p. 75. The extant MSS of the
Chester cycle belong to the end of the sixteenth century, but the substantial features
of the passage quoted above are found in the fifteenth century Brome play on the same
subject (Anglia, VII, pp. 816-337), with which the Chester play would seem to be
connected.
3 Political etc. Poems, ed. Furnivall, F. J. , p. 177.
• Hymns to the Virgin and Christ, ed. Furnivall, F. J. , p. 3, E. E. T. S. 1867.


## p. 427 (#445) ############################################

Didactic Literature
427
mirrors which reflect the tastes of the people, in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. An ingenuous audience wished to be
moved easily to tears and laughter; rough humour and simple
pathos jostled each other on the booths or travelling stages on
which were set forth the shrewishness of Noah's wife, and Isaac
submissive to his father's stroke, the boisterous comedy of
quarrelling shepherds and their criticism of the angelic voices.
It was not gold and frankincense and myrrh that would appeal
most to the imagination of the idler in the market place, but a
ball, a bird and 'a bob of cherys,' which the visiting shepherds
give to the Child-Christ, as they address him with
Hayll, lytyll tyne mop!
Of oure crede thou art crop;
I wold drynk on thy cop,
Lytyll day starnel.
Truly these writers and actors 'served God in their mirth,'but
they were not allowed to go on their way unmolested. There are
poems against miracle plays as against friars, and sermons too;
and in the mass of carols and love lyrics, whether amorous or
divine, which form a characteristic feature of fourteenth and
fifteenth century English poetry, and which are treated in an
earlier chapter in this volume, there appear now and then the
spoil-sports who think 'the worlde is but a vanyte'? and, when
the briar holds the huntsman in full flight, only take it as a
warning to ponder on more solemn things.
Of the purely didactic literature that was intended for daily
needs, a typical example may be seen in John Mirk's Instructions
for Parish Priests, a versified translation from Latin of a very
practical kind, concerned with the things that are to be done
or left undone, the duties of priests and what they are to teach
and all such items as entered into the daily religious life of the
peoples. To this we may add 'babees' books' and poems of homely
instruction, in which the wise man teaches his son and the good
wife her daughter. For those who were soon able to buy printed
books, there were works like the first dated book published in
England, the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, whilst
Caxton's Book of Curtesye, addressed to 'lytyl John,' and his
printing of a Great and Little Cato sufficiently indicate the
popularity of precept and wisdom literature. The middle of the
2
3
· Towneley Plays, ed. England, G. and Pollard, A. W. , 1897, p. 139.
Hymns to the Virgin and Christ, pp. 83 and 91.
Ed. Peacock, E. , E. E. T. 8. 1848.


## p. 428 (#446) ############################################

428
Political and Religious Verse
fifteenth century gives us the Book of Quinte Essence, an early
treatise on 'natural science,' in which, among other wonderful
things, we learn how 'to reduce an oold feble evangelik man to
the firste strenkthe of yongthe' and how 'to make a man that is
a coward, hardy and strong. ' And, in a fourteenth century MS you
may run your eyes over medical recipes", which vary between
cures 'for the fever quarteyn' and devices 'to make a woman say
the what thu askes hir. Woman was ever a disturbing factor,
'
and the songs of medieval satirists do not spare her. One of
them ends his verses with the counsel of despair:
I hold that man ryght wele at ese,
That can turn up hur haltar and lat hur goa.
To the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries belongs the figure
of Robin Hood the outlaw, who was known to the writers of
Piers Plowman in the middle of the fourteenth century and
stories of whose deeds were first printed by Wynkyn de Worde
at the close of the fifteenth century, in the Lytell Geste; and
with a reference to him this brief summary of 'rank and file'
literature must close. He is the typical hero of English medieval
popular romance, open-handed, brave, merciful, given to archery
and venery, good-humoured, jocular, loyal, woman-protecting,
priestcraft-hating, Mary-loving, God-fearing, somewhat rough
withal, caring little for the refinements of life, and fond of a fight
above all things': In this combination of qualities we may fitly
see that blending of Norman and Englishman which helped to
make the England of the ages of faith a ‘merrie England. ' Akin
in many ways to Hereward the Englishman and Fulk Fitz-Warin
the Norman, he represents, in the ballads that grew up around
his name, the spirit of revolt against lordly tyranny, and he
stands for the free open life of the greenwood and the oppressed
folk. The ruling classes had their Arthur and his knights,
their 'romances of prys,' the placid dream-world in which moved
the abstractions of Stephen Hawes and the bloodless creatures
.
1 Reliquiae Antiquae, vol. 1, p. 51.
Ibid. p. 77. A more gallant feeling is shown in the records of the Pui, a
fourteenth century association established in London originally by foreign merchants
in imitation of similar associations in France, en le honour de Dier, Madame Seinte
Marie and all saints, por ceo qe jolietes, pais, honestez, douceur, deboneiretes, e bon
amour, sanz infinite, soit maintenue. In that society, no lady or other woman being
allowed to be present at the festival of song, it was held to be the duty of members de
honurer, cheir, et loer trestotes dames, totes houres en touz lieus, au taunt en lour absence
come en lour presence. See Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis, vol. 11, p. 225, Liber
custumarum, Rolls Series, 1860, ed. Riley, H. T.
8 Hales, J. W. , Peroy Folio.


## p. 429 (#447) ############################################

The Fifteenth Century 429
of the 'court-poetry. The people had their songs by the way-
side, their ballads born of communal dance and their more or less
pagan festivals, at which sons of the soil, maidens and apprentices
who had been bidden to
Suffer maister and maistresse paciently
And doo their biddyng obediently
Serve atte the tabille manerly 1
could, for a while, escape from these duties and enter into a life of
a
a
their own.
A word may be permitted by way of postscript, not merely
to this chapter but also to the present volume. It has been
sometimes urged that the fifteenth century, in the matter of
purely English literature, is dull and uninteresting ; that it is an
uninviting, barren waste, in which it were idle and unprofitable
to spend one's time when it can be fleeted carelessly in 'the
demesnes that here adjacent lie,' belonging to the stately pleasure
houses of Chaucer and the Elizabethans on the one side and on
the other. It would rather appear that a century, the beginning
of which saw the English Mandeville translators at work, and
the end of which saw one of those versions printed; a century
to which may be credited The Flower and the Leaf, the Paston
letters, Caxton's prefaces and translations, the immortal Malory,
lyrics innumerable, sacred and secular, certain ballads, in the
main, as we now know them, The Nut Brown Maid (in itself
sufficient, in form and music and theme, to make the fortune' of
any century), carols and many of the miracle plays in their
present form, can well hold its own in the history of our literature
as against the centuries that precede or follow it. At least it is
not deficient either in variety of utterance or in many-sidedness
of interest. It is not merely full of the promise that all periods
of transition possess, but its actual accomplishment is not to be
contemned and its products are not devoid either of humour or
of beauty,
· Reliquiac Antiquae, vol.