4 - The Auchinleck Manuscript and the Beginnings of Tail-Rhyme Romance

Summary

One cannot go far in the study of Middle English romance without encountering the Auchinleck manuscript. Although it does not contain the earliest surviving examples of Middle English romance (the couplet romances of King Horn, Havelok and Floris and Blauncheflur exist in earlier copies), it is by far the earliest of manuscripts containing Middle English material to foreground the genre: roughly three-quarters of its bulk is taken up by its seventeen romances. And of course it does contain the earliest examples of tail-rhyme romance. This fact alone would make the study of it inevitable in a history of the origins of tail-rhyme romance, but there are additional features of the Auchinleck manuscript which affect our understanding of how and why the English tail-rhyme romance came into being.

There are thirteen tail-rhyme texts in the Auchinleck manuscript, seven of which are romances written wholly or partially (in the case of Bevis) in tail-rhyme stanzas. The remaining six tail-rhyme texts are: a romancelike narrative of a visit to purgatory (item 6, Owayne Miles); a moralised debate on the virtues of women (item 34, The Thrush and the Nightingale); two Marian lyrics (item 16, the Assumption of the Virgin and item 29, The Making of Our Lady's Psalter) and two works of pious instruction (item 34, The Sayings of St Bernard and item 39, The Four Foes of Mankind). Taken together, these uncomplicated works of pious and moral edification are a good representation of the local tradition of tail-rhyme poetry from which tail-rhyme romance had sprung, and their presence in the Auchinleck manuscript alongside the romances makes the continuity and relevance of this earlier tradition explicit.