Power Corrupts! An Anglo-Norman Poem on the Abuse of Power

Summary

London British Library MS Harley 209, a miscellany of texts in Latin and French, features, on folios 7va line 26–8ra line 14, a sixty-four-line poem in French on the all-pervading abuse of power in society. Ruth Dean listed it in her Anglo-Norman Literature as a ‘Lament’, dating the script in the first half of the fourteenth century and noting that the text is ‘known only in this manuscript’ and that there is no edition. She described it thus: ‘This poem laments the abuse of power among all classes: in sixteen monorhymed alexandrine quatrains.’ It is the third of a group of four Anglo-Norman poems contained in this manuscript and will be the subject of this chapter.

The manuscript is a vellum codex of 126 folios in a modern binding. Extensive restoration and conservation work was carried out on it in the nineteenth century (the pencilled record in the back is dated 1875). It measures about 196mm x 146mm; the sizes of the writing blocks vary. The British Library printed catalogue classes it as a miscellany in various hands and of varying dates, and lists 113 separate items; the British Library electronic catalogue calls it a ‘miscellany of devotional and theological texts from Abingdon Abbey; late 13th–early 14th cent.’.

The four Anglo-Norman poems are written in two columns on folios 5r–9*r, and it is this early part of the volume which concerns us here. Structural analysis is difficult because most of the gatherings were repaired on the spine side in the rebinding. Folios 2–7 are visibly an original three-leaf quire. Folios 8–14 are a ‘repaired’ quire, including f.9r* which is blank on both sides but with a piece of vellum, measuring 117mm x 100mm, inset in the top right-hand corner; the recto of this gives the last eighteen lines of the fourth poem in the group, with generous margins, while the verso has a piece of Latin text, in a different hand, which has had its left side cropped off. Our group of poems follows two Latin sermons on folios 2, 3, 4 and the top part of 5r; it fills the rest of this quire and continues smoothly into the next one, where it is followed on folio 10r by short unconnected Latin texts.