What Six Unalike Lyrics in British Library MS Harley 2253 Have Alike in Manuscript Layout

Summary

The most celebrated early Middle English collection of lyrics is in London, British Library, MS Harley 2253. A recent bibliography by Susanna Fein shows how much has been written about these poems. A convenient edition is that by G. L. Brook (1968), whose view of what a lyric is made him exclude some longer poems and the political poems, all of which are available in the edition by K. Böddeker (1878); and the political poems are also in R. H. Robbins’ Historical Poems (1959). The manuscript has been compiled without thought of what genres of poem in length or subject matter should be included, or whether English or Anglo-Norman. In all just over forty poems may be considered English: short poems of various verse forms and metres.

This paper is about the six short poems in this manuscript written in continuous lines as if prose, and I wonder why they are so written, a question to which I have found no truly convincing answer. The first in the manuscript, at fol. 63v, is Brook’s No. 5, given by him the title ‘The Lover’s Complaint’, NIMEV No. 4194, Wanley’s catalogue entry ‘30. Another Love-Song, written as Prose’; at fol. 66v, Brook’s No. 7, ‘The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale, NIMEV No. 2207, Wanley ‘34. An ingenious Description of the Authors Mistress; written as Prose’; at fol. 67r, Brook’s No. 9, ‘A wayle whyt ase whalles bon’, NIMEV No. 105, Wanley ‘36. Another [Love-Song] whose Author complains of his Mistresses Cruelty (written as Prose)’; at fol. 76r, Brook’s No. 18, ‘A Spring Song of the Passion’, NIMEV No. 3963, Wanley ‘53. A Ditty upon our Lords crucifixion; written as Prose’, the first stanza is fortuitously fitted into three manuscript lines leaving on him is al ylong to begin what is written continuously without regard to the poetic lineation, though that is well articulated by punctuation (also in British Library, Royal MS 2 F.viii); at fol. 76r, Brook’s No. 19, the macaronic ‘Dum Ludis Floribus’, NIMEV No. 694.5, Wanley ‘55. A Song, partly Latin & partly French; as it seems, of an English man desiring the Fruition of his Parisian Mistress. ibid. [fol. 76] (still written as Prose)’; at fols. 114v–115r, Brook’s No. 30, ‘The Man in the Moon’, NIMEV No. 2066, Wanley ‘81.