[In the following essay, Fletcher proposes a new theory regarding the date, place, and authorship of The Owl and the Nightingale.]

To the cannibalizing of books there is no end. This is so self-evidently true that it needs no extensive demonstration here, but one particular instance, which concerns either the early Middle English poem of The Owl and the Nightingale, or its congener, has generally eluded critical notice, and thus deserves some attention.

No one knows exactly when The Owl and the Nightingale was written, where, or by whom, though there has been no shortage of debate on all these questions—appropriately enough, given the contentiousness that is this poem's driving force.¹ Strictly speaking, the best that can be said for its date of composition is some time up to the terminus ad quem suggested by the palæography of its two extant manuscripts, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix (hereafter C) and Oxford, MS Jesus College 29 (part II) (hereafter J). The handwriting of J had long been considered to date to the latter part of the thirteenth century, and that of C to the first half. Neil Ker modified this opinion, estimating that C equally belonged to the second half of the thirteenth century.² He compared C with London, British Library, MS Royal 3 D.vi, datable between 1283 and 1300, and Malcolm Parkes has also suggested a comparison of C with London, British Library, MS Additional 24686, datable c. 1284.³ In declaring both manuscripts to be near contemporaries, Ker's reappraisal paved the way for a reconsideration of the composition date of The Owl and the Nightingale that had currently been finding favor, 1189-1216.⁴ Recently, an investigation by Neil Cartlidge has followed through the implications of Ker's redating of C.⁵ By adding new weight to the view held by J. E. Wells that the history of the poem's textual transmission is probably quite short, conceivably even as short, Cartlidge suggests, as a matter of months, he has persuasively argued that the theory that the poem was composed not long after the death of Henry III in 1272 has much to commend it.⁶ Therefore, the composition of The Owl and the Nightingale could have occurred not so very long before C and J were copied.⁷ As for the poem's place of origin, its composition by an author trained to write in Dorset, Hampshire, or Surrey, perhaps indeed in Guildford itself, was once thought likely on linguistic grounds.⁸ But a fresh investigation of this evidence, fortified by the latest work in Middle English dialectology, has determined that while this traditional view may indeed be correct, not enough is known to fix the poem's language to these counties quite so firmly, leave alone to fix it to Guildford. In fact, it could hale from “almost anywhere in Wessex, the Home Counties or the south-west Midlands.”⁹ And as for this author's identity, opinion has ranged as widely, between either the Nicholas of Guildford vaunted within the poem as supreme arbiter of the disputatious birds, or a friend or acquaintance of his, or a certain “Mayster Iohan … of Guldeuorde” whose name featured in a quatrain formerly found in J, or even some anonymous female author, perhaps the inmate of a religious house.¹⁰

The material that I wish to introduce here has prompted me to propose a new hypothesis on each of these interrelated questions of date, place, and authorship. I must stress that as a hypothesis, it cannot be proved in any forensically absolute way, but I believe it has as much, if not more, in its favor than some of the hypotheses on the genesis of the poem that are currently available. This being so, it should at least not come malapropos. I will begin with the least controversial part of my argument, a resemblance that can be established between The Owl and the Nightingale and part of another, later, text—a resemblance so striking that it cannot be gainsaid.

On reading the Moralitates of the Dominican preacher and theologian Robert Holcot (†1349), one comes across the following passage:

Narratur, quod inter philomenam et bubonem est naturale odium, in tantum, quod cum philomena in nocte cantat dulciter, nititur ipsam in praedam rapere, et ei fortiter insidiatur. Quod cauens philomela, rubum vel spinam densissimam in frutice intrat, et ibidem a bubonis insidijs conseruatur.¹¹

(It is related that a natural hatred exists between nightingale and owl, so much so that when the nightingale sings sweetly at night, [the owl] tries to seize [her] as [her] prey and lays ambush for her stoutly. Chary of this, the nightingale enters a bramble or the densest thorns on a bush, and guards herself there against the owl's snares.)

There can be little doubt but that the opening of Holcot's moralitas bears a striking resemblance to the opening of The Owl and the Nightingale. From its outset, the Middle English poem emphasizes the animosity between the two birds (compare its lines 3-10 with Holcot); specifies that song is the chief instigator of their antagonism (compare its lines 11-12 with Holcot, and note how Holcot's text is similarly to be read to imply that a causal connection exists between the nightingale's sweet singing and the owl's felonious intent);¹² and presents the Nightingale as being well aware of the Owl's disposition and hence expediently choosing to safeguard herself by perching in the middle of a bushy fastness (compare lines 13-20 and 56-60 with Holcot).

There can be only three principal ways in which to explain this resemblance: either Holcot actually knew The Owl and the Nightingale (the Moralitates were written after c. 1334 and before 1342, several years after the composition of the poem, whenever precisely that might prove to be);¹³ or he knew its congener, a text which may or may not have been in English;¹⁴ or he knew a source or tradition, not necessarily in written, but perhaps in oral, form, with which The Owl and the Nightingale's author had also been acquainted, or which its author had even brought into being. It seems impossible to decide finally between these three options, but two facts in combination may incline us towards the first, Holcot's acquaintance with the actual poem, and away from the second two. Firstly, he ascribes no source to the passage, as he normally (though not invariably) does to his other moralitates. This lack of ascription would be perfectly understandable were his source a vernacular text rather than a respectable Latin bestiary or the like, some work of established currency and academic pedigree to which reference, in the scholarly milieu in which Holcot customarily moved, could fittingly be made.¹⁵ At the same time, he uses the verb “Narratur” (“It is related”) of the way in which this source has communicated. Admittedly, the exact meaning of “related” here might strictly be interpreted as wandering in a no-man's-land between the oral and the written. Was his source “related” on the page or “related” by word of mouth? Yet when a verb as common as “Dicitur” (“It is said”) would have been as available to Holcot, as it was to his contemporaries, to refer to words actually uttered (for example, a medieval author retailing a story found in Bede is more likely to say that Beda narrat than Beda dicit the story in question), “Narratur” in this context sounds as if it may have intended the written medium. And secondly, indeed perhaps more tellingly, the tradition of the animosity between owl and nightingale is not anywhere known in bird lore, so far as I am aware, outside the Middle English poem.¹⁶ To be sure, absence of evidence should not be mistaken as evidence of absence, but until such time as a congener or a common source or tradition may be identified which may explain this mutuality in both The Owl and the Nightingale and the Moralitates, their resemblance broaches possibilities, not least that of Holcot's being the only known subsequent reference to the Middle English poem yet known, that are worth briefly pursuing. The pursuit is especially encouraged given the tantalizing scarcity of information about the poem's origins. Anticipating these possibilities, I wish to strike out from this Holcot passage to add the following bold hypothesis to those currently proposed for the poem's genesis: that the author of The Owl and the Nightingale may have been a Dominican; and that his poem may have originated in Guildford after 1275, perhaps even as late as c. 1282.

Let us for the sake of the present argument grant that Holcot knew The Owl and the Nightingale itself rather than some lookalike tradition. How and where might he have come to know it? Since texts travel, especially ones so readily portable in size as are the poem's two extant witnesses, then it might easily have come to him. In which case, it could have done so from virtually any part of England. Conversely, he might have gone to where it was, or have visited the area close to, or overlapping, that in which it was composed and in which, at least in the earliest years of its existence, it is first likely to have circulated. Holcot, as earlier noted, was a Dominican, and it was the essence of his order, as indeed of the mendicant orders generally, to travel. What is known of his movements shows him to have travelled in the central Midlands (for a long period he was resident in Oxford), but also in the diocese of Salisbury, where in 1342 he was licensed to hear confessions.¹⁷ And 1342 marks the terminus ad quem for the composition of the Moralitates. In this diocese he would have been very close to the place of origin traditionally advanced for The Owl and the Nightingale, Guildford, Surrey, in the adjacent diocese of Winchester, and actually in the diocese in which the poem's only other place-name, Portesham in Dorset, is located. At the very least, it can be said that at about the time when Holcot wrote his Moralitates, he was spending some time in an area not incompatible with that to which the original written language of the poem's author might be thought to correspond, and that he was in broad geographical proximity to the two place-names which the poem mentions. But this only raises the possibility of his having encountered the poem in the likely region of its origin while on his travels in the southern parts of England; it proves nothing for certain.

We will return briefly to speculate on the possible cultural implications of the Holcot connection at the end of this article. First, let us reexamine the association between The Owl and the Nightingale and Guildford. As is well known, the place-name occurs once in the poem when “Maister Nichole of Guldeforde” is introduced and credited as being the best judge of the birds (line 191). As Cartlidge has observed, “Maister Nichole” was doubtless very familiar to those who first received the poem.¹⁸ Where were they familiar with him? The Wren at the end of the debate (lines 1752-54) says that he lives now in Portesham, “Bi þare see in ore utlete”, to where Owl and Nightingale fly off out of sight to seek their judgment in the poem's concluding lines. The Wren is describing a distant geography to her audience, and there is reason to suppose that the author was doing likewise to his. Would the implied audience of The Owl and the Nightingale, a community “in the know,” and indeed, as many critics have thought, some kind of clerical coterie,¹⁹ need to be told where Nicholas lived if that community were already in Portesham (unless, of course, that was precisely the point, an elaborately redundant joke)? But historical Portesham supported no community to match that implied in the poem, so the answer must be probably not. Did the implied audience, then, comprise the nearby Benedictine monks of Abbotsbury? After all, the abbey had the advowson to the Portesham living that Nicholas of Guildford apparently held.²⁰ If so, the joke was just as elaborate in its overkill: the monks were on the doorstep a mile and a half away, they would have been perfectly aware of Portesham by virtue of their temporal interest in it, and they were all living in the county of Dorset. So are we dealing with a joke in which the blindingly obvious was being stated and in which a distance was being fictionalized for fun or, alternatively, no joke, a statement in which actual distance was being imputed and a relatively foreign geography being described? There is another piece of evidence, not without difficulties in interpretation of its own, to be sure, but which could suggest that the latter reading is correct, and that the author was writing about Portesham at a remove. The possible implications of the content of the quatrain on the “broaken leafe” formerly found in J and now missing from that manuscript deserve fuller consideration, for conceivably they provide the tie breaker to a question that literary arbitration alone cannot resolve.²¹ The quatrain apparently ran as follows:

Mayster Iohan eu greteþ. of Guldeuorde þo.
And sendeþ eu to Seggen. Þat synge nul he no.
Ac on þisse wise he wille endy his song:
God Louerd of Heuene. beo vs alle among. Amen.(22)

Whether these verses, which read like a tongue-in-cheek missive from “Mayster Iohan … of Guldeuorde,” were found in the common exemplar, X, which lay ultimately behind both C and J, as Celia Sisam thought, or were added to some intermediary copy of that exemplar lying between X and J, as Betty Hill thought equally possible, is immaterial for the present argument.²³ More to the point is the fact that there appeared on the “broaken leafe” someone else who, by virtue of his name, seems to have had a Guildford link. Two different and independent names, therefore, one “Maister Nichole” inside the text of The Owl and the Nightingale, and the other, a certain “Mayster Iohan,” outside it and within a text of his own on the missing “broaken leafe,” need to be weighed in relation to the question of the provenance of a portion of J's contents. Both names are “of Guildford,” and together they lend substance to the supposition that at least some of the contents of the X exemplar (if Sisam is right) or of an exemplar intermediary between X and J (acknowledging Hill's suggestion) may have had a Guildford connection.²⁴ The combination of Guildford names is not proof positive of this, of course, but it is of circumstantial interest. Moreover, “Mayster Iohan's” quatrain has all the wonted appearance of the sort of scribal whimsy randomly added to many a medieval manuscript and which can sometimes prove helpful in determining the early provenance of a manuscript's contents. Indeed, Sisam made a strong case that the quatrain was independent and sufficient unto itself, not some mere appended colophon.²⁵ Yet “Mayster Iohan” of the broken leaf has sooner been recruited by critics into the uncertain service of trying to establish who the author of The Owl and the Nightingale may have been than in helping to forge any link between some of the texts in J (or indeed in X) and Guildford, although this is the capacity in which “Mayster Iohan” would seem more gainfully employed. Who he was may never be known, but he was evidently a cleric of some sort. In this regard, it might be noted in passing that two Johns of Guildford, either or neither of whom may be the John in question here, appear in episcopal registers for the diocese of Winchester at a date compatible with our mooted composition date, nor have I found any others of this name in early episcopal registers of any other English diocese. The earliest extant Winchester register, that of John de Pontissara (bishop of Winchester between 1282 and 1304), notes a Johannes de Guldeford, acolyte, admitted to the church of Elvetham, Hampshire, in the diocese of Winchester, on 4 December 1304.²⁶ The register of Pontissara's successor, Henry Woodlock (bishop between 1305 and 1316), also records this man having received his dimissory letter for the subdiaconate as rector of Elvetham on 12 March 1305, and notes his ordinations as deacon and priest respectively on 12 June and 18 December in the same year.²⁷ Elvetham is some fourteen miles west-north-west of Guildford, so this Johannes, a local man, was serving locally. Another Johannes, however, Frater Iohannes de Guldeford, Augustinian canon of Merton, was ordained subdeacon on 22 February and deacon on 20 December 1309. Yet it is of incidental interest to note that since Merton is only some twenty miles north-east of Guildford, the same may be said of him as of his Elvetham namesake, that he was a local man serving locally (and his ordination to the diaconate, as it happens, also took place in the Guildford church of Holy Trinity).²⁸

If we acknowledge, therefore, that the hypothesis of an actual Guildford connection of The Owl and the Nightingale has circumstantially more in its favor than either the mere appearance in the poem of a “Maister Nichole of Guldeforde” or its original written dialect could ever between them hope to prove, let us follow the hypothesis through to see where it may lead. The issue of the poem's auspices would naturally arise, and of whether Guildford could have nourished writing of such stature and content. Was a cultural formation available there to equal that which the poem manifests? For in spite of the apparent self-effacement of its composition in English, the poet was culturally literate in several provinces: he was acquainted with canon law; knew too something of the procedures of the common-law courts; and was conversant with traditions courtly as well as clerkly.²⁹ The answer to the question may be yes, but hardly before 1275, the year in which Guildford's Dominican priory was founded by Queen Eleanor of Provence.³⁰ Apart from the priory, Guildford was not otherwise well served with religious houses or parish churches of sufficient known distinction to support the intellectual environment to which the writing of the poem seems best to answer.³¹ Guildford's sole exception would have been its Dominican priory, and furthermore, the cultural literacy demonstrated in the poem was precisely of the class that Dominicans were currently renowned for. Exactly how needs to be explained, for were Dominican auspices to be fastened on this poem, it would have major consequences for our understanding, not least for our understanding of how it may have transpired that The Owl and the Nightingale was also preserved, almost certainly in one copy and probably also in a second, in the library of Titchfield Abbey, a Premonstratensian house to the south of Winchester diocese, not far from the Hampshire coast.

To begin with, it should be noted that Guildford's Dominican priory was no ordinary foundation, but a royal one. It had been established by Henry III's widow, Eleanor, in memory of her grandson prince Henry, who had died at Guildford on 20 October 1274. The young prince's heart, deposited in the priory church, was exposed to view as the anniversary of his death approached.³² Thus the priory's institutional link with the Crown was maintained in repair well after the initial foundation. Given this sustained royal attachment, it might be expected that court culture would find easy accommodation among the Guildford Dominicans, especially when the general fact is also borne in mind that by the second half of the thirteenth century the Dominican presence at court was already pervasive. The royal confessor was a Dominican, and the king often had Dominicans in his company. At court they had, in fact, a permanent establishment, and their services to the Crown continued to grow apace during the reign of Edward I.³³ Court versatility and an acquaintance with its literary culture would therefore have been de rigeur for the royally-connected Dominican. While some such affiliation as this might account for the marriage of the clerical and the courtly that critics have detected within the poem,³⁴ far more is needed if the proposition of its Dominican authorship is to be convincingly fleshed out. To turn next, then, to the poet's familiarity with the procedures of the civil and ecclesiastical courts: this also would have been entirely germane to Dominicans. Involvement in civil and ecclesiastical cases was frequently the lot of the Dominican who found employment outside his Order. Dominicans functioned in various administrative capacities, including often royal and episcopal ones. So much were their legal counsels coveted that they found themselves increasingly embroiled in the handling of actions, arbitrations, and judgments, to the Order's official dismay.³⁵ They were customarily contracting responsibilities, then, for which a knowledge of law, civil and canon, was indispensable.³⁶ To cite but one particular instance from the letters of Robert Grosseteste (bishop of Lincoln between 1235 and 1253): In the very year of his consecration, Grosseteste wasted no time in requesting from the Provincial of the English Dominicans the assistance of friars John de St Giles and Geoffrey de Clive, “addentes eisdem aliquem tertium de fratribus vestris, qui in juris civilis et canonici peritia fuerit probatus et exercitatus, cujus possum sano et incorrupto uti secretius consilio, in tot dubiis casibus incessanter emergentibus, et in tanta jurisperitorum hominum secularium, nutante et incerta varietate” (“adding to them some third member of your brethren, who has been tried and tested in [his] practical knowledge of civil and canon law, whose wholesome and uncorrupted counsel I can discreetly use in so many doubtful cases that ceaselessly arise, and in such great wavering and uncertainly various opinion of the secular men of law”).³⁷ When a civil and canon lawyer was needed, a Dominican was likely to qualify. Thus the twin legal aspects of The Owl and the Nightingale would fit snugly in a Dominican context.

And what of the prospect of a Dominican writing English poetry in the first place? This poses little difficulty. The Dominicans had already begun composing substantial work in the vernacular soon after the arrival of the Order in England. Ancrene Wisse, the case for whose Dominican authorship has recently been convincingly reinvented, is perhaps the most substantial example.³⁸ It was probably composed soon after 1224.³⁹ And it is interesting, incidentally, to note certain similarities of subject matter that connect The Owl and the Nightingale with Ancrene Wisse and also with Hali Meidhad, since it is conceivable that these two latter texts were by the same author.⁴⁰ Strictly speaking, these similarities could stem from common traditions, but if both Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meidhad were produced by a Dominican and thus first available within the Dominican Order, such coincidences are worth briefly pausing to observe.⁴¹

Therefore, neither the poem's content, nor the very fact of its composition in English, militate against Dominican authorship. Let us persevere, then, with our supposition that a Guildford-based Dominican wrote The Owl and the Nightingale. How might the appearance of one or probably two copies of his poem in the library of Titchfield Abbey be explained? First and in general, there were longstanding institutional links between the Dominicans and the Premonstratensians—the Dominicans had derived their Rule from Prémontré—which may have encouraged some ongoing association between the Orders.⁴² It consequently comes as no surprise to notice a vita of St Dominic singled out as one of the items in a volume listed in the Titchfield Abbey library catalogue.⁴³ But second and in particular, apart from such foundational affinities, Titchfield Premonstratensians and Guildford Dominicans were brought into regular contact, if nowhere else, at their ordinations. Although no diocesan ordination lists are extant for the period that we are exploring in connection with the poem's possible date of composition, c. 1275 or a few years later, lists follow soon after, and in them potential lines of communication between Guildford and Titchfield are clear. To cite but one: on 23 September 1312, in the parish church at Kingston, the Dominican Ricardus de Guldeford was ordained acolyte with Iohannes de Cantuaria, canon of Titchfield.⁴⁴ Richard's name follows immediately after John's in the ordination list. It would be unwarrantable to imagine that such congress would have been unwonted in the 1270's. Consequently, were texts to find their way from Guildford into the impressive library at Titchfield, cultural and perhaps even personal contacts are in evidence that would make that eventuality unsurprising, not to mention the comparative proximity of both places (about forty miles between) within the same diocese.

The catalogue of the library of Titchfield reveals striking correspondences between various items available there and several of those found in either C, in J, or in both.⁴⁵ The reason for this patent, if puzzling, connection may be finally unsearchable, but other reasons than those currently proposed seem equally credible. Cartlidge has suggested that C, J, and their common exemplar, X, were all produced in some religious house, “quite possibly one linked in some way to the Premonstratensian house at Titchfield.”⁴⁶ This is perfectly plausible. Just as plausible is the suggestion that C, J, and X were all actually assembled and copied at Titchfield. The immediate objection to this would seem to be that the written dialect of C and J is strongly West Midlands: C has been localized in Worcestershire and J in Herefordshire.⁴⁷ Moreover, the X exemplar itself had a number of scribes working on it, two on The Owl and the Nightingale alone, who were also producing a West Midlands written dialect.⁴⁸ But the belief that the written dialect of a piece of Middle English must indicate the place or region in which that Middle English was copied has proved a stubborn one.⁴⁹ A written dialect can, of course, indicate only one of two things: either it may indicate, in those cases where a scribe “translated,” to greater or lesser extents, the orthography of his exemplar into his own preferred orthography while copying, where that scribe was originally trained to write; or it may indicate that he was a careful, literatim-copyist who reproduced the orthographies of his exemplar more or less faithfully, keeping his own preferences in abeyance.⁵⁰ In the latter case, the scribe could have been copying his Middle English anywhere; no personal intrusions would betray any alternative regionalisms. And in the former, he could easily have moved from the region of his origin and have done his copying in some other area where, though a different written dialect prevailed, he continued to produce the orthography of his erstwhile region of origin. Such a state of affairs would have been highly likely in Titchfield, in fact, because the abbey was initially founded c. 1232 by a colony of monks transplanted from the mother house in Halesowen, Worcestershire, in the West Midlands.⁵¹ We are therefore entirely justified in assuming a strong West Midlands presence at Titchfield, especially in its early days, and this could have made itself felt in the scriptorium. However, if C and J were assembled and copied at Titchfield, it must be admitted that both had presumably migrated from there by the time that the library catalogue was compiled (c. 1400), since it lists no single volume whose contents and order quite match those of C or J. Yet migration is not impossible: Premonstratensians made arrangements for their library books to be loaned out, just as they were permitted to receive books on loan.⁵² Another indicator of production in some center at a south-easterly remove from the West Midlands location suggested prima facie by their written dialect is perhaps to be found in some of the content of J. As Hill has noted, it contains at least four texts with south-east Midlands affinities.⁵³ A site in Hampshire might be thought more readily placed to acquire such texts (and recall that it was canon John of Canterbury who was ordained next to brother Richard of Guildford in 1312). In addition, research into the original provenance of C and J has not been able to connect either manuscript conclusively with the West Midlands. Hill's hypothesis concerning J, that it may have been culled from some monastic library by one of the Commissioners for the dissolution, Edward Carne (†1561), observes that while Carne and his associates worked their way westwards through the counties of England, they began in Winchester.⁵⁴ And while Carole Weinberg's analysis of the Latin marginal glosses that appear in C's copy of Laȝamon's Brut has concluded that they could have derived ultimately from materials held by the library of Worcester Cathedral, the glosses were probably not an original contribution of their scribe in C, but an inheritance from his exemplar, and thus of considerably less value in helping to determine the original provenance of C itself.⁵⁵

So to summarize this reasoning, it would be no surprise were texts originating among the Dominicans of Guildford to find their way into the library of Titchfield Abbey, and this would be compatible with the hypothesis concerning the genesis of The Owl and the Nightingale that is being explored here. But while it is, to reiterate, simply a hypothesis, it deserves an airing since it accommodates the few known facts concerning the poem with an efficiency equal to that of other hypotheses currently in circulation.

It seems appropriate now to tie up these threads of speculation, since the case has long since moved from a comparative terra firma, what seems to be a reminiscence of The Owl and the Nightingale in Holcot, to a terra speculativa in which have been pursued questions of text and manuscript provenance. If Guildford provenance be accepted for the poem, one final speculation may be permitted to knit up the feast. Towards the end of the debate, the Wren and the Owl express dismay at the stunting of Nicholas's ecclesiastical career, and give their views on how this should be remedied (lines 1760-76). These lines have often been discussed in the context of trying to decide whether or not the poem really is a plea for preferment:

“He naueþ bute one woning.
Þat his bischopen muchel schame,
An alle þan þat of his nome
Habbeþ ihert, & of his dede.
Hwi nulleþ hi nimen heom to rede
Þat he were mid heom ilome,
For teche heom of his wisdome,
An ȝiue him rente a uale stude
Þat he miȝte heom ilome be mide?”
“Certes,” cwaþ þe Hule, “þat is soð,
Þeos riche men wel muche misdoð
Þat leteþ þane gode mon,
Þat of so feole þinge con,
An ȝiueþ rente wel misliche,
An of him leteþ wel lihtliche;
Wiþ heore cunne heo beoþ mildre
An ȝeueþ rente litle childre.”

The Wren observes that Nicholas has only “one woning”, presumably the living at Portesham whose value, historically, was indeed quite modest.⁵⁶ She goes on to say that this shames his bishops, who ought to ensure that he is provided with income from several livings so that he has the means to associate with them, presumably taking up residence in their households. In this way they can benefit from his sagacity at first hand. Evidently, the Wren supports the system of pluralities, a particularly sensitive practice in the thirteenth century after consciousness of it had been raised by various legatine constitutions.⁵⁷ The Owl agrees with the Wren's proposal (their joint agreement perhaps indicating that this was also the view on pluralities shared by the author?), and adds the criticism that “þeos riche men” do wrong to dispose revenues from livings indiscriminately, setting no store by Nicholas. With their own kindred they are more lenient, however, and give revenues to little children. Who are “þeos riche men”? The bishops referred to in line 1761?⁵⁸ Possibly, but not necessarily. “Þeos riche men” may, alternatively, constitute a generic reference to noble, secular patrons who held rights of presentation to benefices.⁵⁹ If so, Wren and Owl would have been seen as combining to censure lapses in the two chief mechanisms of ecclesiastical preferment, collation and presentation: the Wren, by alluding to negligent episcopal collations, and the Owl, to nepotistic secular presentations, to benefices. This may be a more likely interpretation of the Wren and Owl's words than that they were exclusively targeting the bishops. A bipartite censure would certainly be more even-handed, and indeed historically justified, since, whatever about the negligence of bishops, nepotistic secular presentation was by no means rare. Grosseteste in a letter c. 1238, for example, is found explaining why he would not install Thomas, the son of earl Ferrers, in a benefice when the youth was not ordained, nor was he quite of canonical age for ordination (at least eighteen years for the subdiaconate, twenty for the diaconate, and twenty-five for the priesthood).⁶⁰ But of the cases of under-age presentation that I have investigated during the period under present review for the possible composition of The Owl and the Nightingale, one is egregious, and corresponds closely to the circumstances excoriated by the Owl. In the very region argued here for the poem's origin, the diocese of Winchester, there occurred a highly controversial and well publicized case of the secular presentation of a “little child” to a rich benefice. The story is complex, but can be quickly summarized. Peter of Guildford, who was chaplain to Archbishop John Pecham (archbishop of Canterbury between 1279 and 1292), had been collated to the rich living of Crondall, a place some thirteen miles west of Guildford, by John de Pontissara, bishop of Winchester, not long after Pontissara's consecration on 12 June 1282. It seems, however, that before that time, and also with Pontissara's complicity, provision had been made to bestow Crondall on a child, James of Spain, the bastard nephew of the wife of Edward I, Eleanor of Castile.⁶¹ The young James had been presented to Crondall on 6 August 1282, but was evidently soon removed on account of his minority and illegitimacy; by 7 February 1283, he is on record being presented as rector of Rothbury, Northumberland, in the diocese of Durham.⁶² The king had intended the vacated benefice to descend to Nicholas de Montimer, the queen's physician, but Pontissara's preemptive collation of Peter of Guildford had now brought himself into confrontation with the king. In 1283, matters came to a head. Archbishop Pecham intervened on Pontissara's behalf, though he reminded him in a letter of 23 May of that year that he had acted against “consilium nostrum et contra Canonicas sanctiones” (against “our advice and contrary to canonical sanctions”) when he had allowed the child to be admitted to Crondall in the first place.⁶³ Circumstances of the affair had become a public talking point (a “rumor publicus”), said the archbishop.⁶⁴ In another letter of the same date addressed to Robert Burnell (bishop of Bath and Wells between 1275 and 1292), who had briefly found himself elected to the see of Winchester between the death in 1280 of Bishop Nicholas of Ely and the appointment of Pontissara,⁶⁵ Pecham now chose by contrast to foreground royal responsibility for the intrusion: “Intrusus est in eandem ecclesiam puer ut dicitur illegitimus vi et armis regalibus” (“A child—it is said an illegitimate one—has been thrust upon the same church [that is, the church of Crondall] by royal force of arms”).⁶⁶ So depending upon whom he was addressing, Pecham chose to aspect the affair a little differently. To Pontissara, he remonstrated that he only had himself to blame, and to others, that it was the royal hand that lay so heavily on the business.

It seems impossible to prove or disprove that The Owl and the Nightingale could have been covertly alluding to the dilemma attending Peter of Guildford's preferment. But at least one thing is clear: the poem seems full of contemporary allusion, and this would be an additional instance of it, whether Peter of Guildford were being specifically glanced at or not, in a conciliar period which had made matters such as these sensitive.⁶⁷ But of course, were Peter of Guildford intended, the composition of The Owl and the Nightingale would need to be fixed at c. 1282, a late, but not impossible, date, and one which would certainly require that C and J be regarded as copies made very soon indeed after the event of the poem's composition.⁶⁸

In sum, may Holcot have known The Owl and the Nightingale by virtue of its early circulation within the Dominican Order, perhaps via some Dominican book network? But speculation has long since outstripped hard evidence. For the time being,

Ne can ich eu na more telle.
Her nis na more of þis spelle.

Notes

1. Indeed, Kathryn Hume, The Owl and the Nightingale: The Poem and its Critics (Toronto, 1975), 127-29, argues that contentiousness is the prime topic of the poem.

2. N. R. Ker, The Owl and the Nightingale: Facsimile of the Jesus and Cotton Manuscripts, EETS, OS 251 (Oxford, 1963), ix. And a number of datable texts in J suggest that it was copied sometime in the last three decades of the thirteenth century, but before 1300. See B. Hill, “Oxford, Jesus College MS. 29: Addenda on Donation, Acquisition, Dating and Relevance of the ‘Broaken Leafe’ Note to ‘The Owl and the Nightingale’,” N&Q [Notes & Queries] 220 (1975): 98-105.

3. Ker, Facsimile, xvi, and M. Laing, Catalogue of Sources for a Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English (Cambridge, Engl., 1993), 70.

4. E. G. Stanley, ed., The Owl and the Nightingale, 2nd ed. (Manchester, 1972; reprt. 1981), 19. (Stanley's edition was first published in 1960, three years before Ker's redating.) All line references to The Owl and the Nightingale will be to Stanley's edition.

5. N. Cartlidge, “The Date of The Owl and the Nightingale,” MÆ [Medium Ævum] 65 (1996): 230-47.

6. J. E. Wells, “The Owl and the Nightingale and MS Cotton,” MLN 48 (1933): 516-19; see 519.

7. Cartlidge, “Date,” 233-34.

8. Cartlidge, “Date,” 234, says “probably a dialect of central southern England (Dorset, Hampshire or Surrey)”, a view modified in his article, “The Linguistic Evidence for the Provenance of The Owl and the Nightingale”, NM [Neuphilologische Mitteliungen], forthcoming. I am grateful to Dr. Cartlidge for allowing me to see a copy of his article in advance of its publication.

9. Cartlidge, “Linguistic Evidence,” forthcoming.

10. Stanley, The Owl and the Nightingale, 19-22, surveys earlier opinion on authorship and offers his own, which follows suit with some earlier critics and which I also share, that an acquaintance of the said Nicholas seems the most likely authorial candidate. My preference for this option is a necessary corollary to the argument that will be made in the course of this article and the reasons for it will become clear as the argument progresses. Cartlidge, “Date,” 240, note 6, inclines to the view that Nicholas was himself the author (a view still held, though gently qualified, in his subsequent article, “The Composition and Social Context of Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29(II) and London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix,” MÆ 66 (1997): 250-69 (see 256-57 and 267-68, note 56). The possibility of female authorship has been most notably championed by A. Barratt, “Flying in the Face of Tradition: A New View of The Owl and the Nightingale”, UTQ [University of Toronto Quarterly] 56 (1986-87): 471-85. She has suggested as author a Benedictine nun of Shaftesbury Abbey, Dorset.

11. M. Roberti Holkoth Angli, Ordinis Prædicatorvm, Professoris Theologiæ olim in Academia Oxoniensi celeberrimi et doctissimi: In Librum Sapientiæ Regis Salomonis Prælectiones CCXIII (Basle, 1586), 732. The passage is the twenty-ninth moralitas in this edition. Holcot goes on to moralize the passage as follows: the nightingale represents the devout, faithful soul, created to praise God through perpetual contemplation and watchful devotion. But the owl who lies hidden in dark places, that is, the devil, who inhabits the dark region of hell, lies in ambush for the soul that renders praise in this way. Lest the soul be seized by the devil, she enters a thorny bramble, that is, a life of harsh penance and one strewn with hardships.

    While the moral interpretation that Holcot fastened on the text is worth knowing, it by no means compels as to read The Owl and the Nightingale in similar terms. The poem, or its congener, has simply served Holcot as a textual mulch for his moralitas. It might be noted that this owl and nightingale motif seems to have been popular with Holcot. It is also found in some manuscripts of the work known as Convertimini, a collection of moralized tales and similitudes (see, for example, London, British Library, MS Royal 7 C.i, fol. 112v, col. b). Convertimini may be another of Holcot's works.

12. This reading is supported by Holcot's moralitas; its outline is given in note 11 above.

13. Beryl Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1960), 146.

14. R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England, 2nd ed. (London, 1970), 127, draws attention to the contrast in singing between owl and nightingale in the late-thirteenth century treatise on the French language by Walter de Bibbesworth: “Aloms ore iuer a boys, / Ou la russinole, the nithingale / Meuz chaunte ki houswan en sale (houle)” (“Now let's go to play in the woods, where the nightingale, the nithingale, sings better than the owl, houle, in the hall”; A. Owen, ed., Le Traité de Walter de Bibbesworth (Paris, 1929), 110). Yet this would still be no match for the details related in Holcot and in the poem. Cartlidge, “Composition and Social Context”, 264, n. 24, draws attention to the classification amongst manuscripts containing French texts of one of the putative copies of The Owl and the Nightingale in the library of Titchfield Abbey (on which see further below). But he plausibly explains this on the grounds that the manuscript may simply have been classified after its first and longest item, an Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone.

15. This is not to imply, however, that Holcot was squeamish about using the vernacular. He allows it momentary space in other works (for example, in the Convertimini, on which see note 11 above), and he depends crucially on English words to derive the requiste moralitas for an allegorized castle in one of the Moralitates that did not find its way into the published edition (see London, British Library, MS Arundel 384, fols 93-94v).

16. Hume, Poem and its Critics, 16-17 and note 4. Hill, “Addenda,” 100, note 14, observed that she had found an earlier association and contrast between an owl and a nightingale only in Walter Map's “Epistle to Valerius” (composed before September 1181). But the association and contrast there is not of the same order as that developed by the Middle English poem or by Holcot.

17. Smalley, English Friars, 136. He may have been in Cambridge, and also attached for a while to the familia of the bishop of Durham, Richard of Bury, though whether in the north or elsewhere is unclear. During the last years of his life, from 1343, he was with the Dominicans at Northampton.

18. Cartlidge, “Date,” 230.

19. For example, Derek A. Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry (London, 1977), 91.

20. Cartlidge, “Composition and Social Context,” 257, speculates that the intended audience of the poem may have been the monks of Abbotsbury. However, the idea that lines 729-30 (“Clerkes, munukes & kanunes, / Þar boþ þos gode wicketunes”) may allude to such a community is weakened by the mention of “kanunes”. These call to mind a congregation of secular or regular canons, hardly a community of Benedictines. Thus the lines seem best interpreted as a generic reference to male religious.

21. On the whole question of the “broaken leafe,” see C. Sisam, “The Broken Leaf in MS. Jesus College, Oxford, 29,” RES [Review of English Studies]. N.S. 5 (1954): 337-43 and Hill, “Addenda,” 98-105.

22. Stanley, The Owl and the Nightingale, 4. The quatrain was almost certainly copied by Thomas Wilkins, the seventeenth-century bibliophile and one-time possessor of J, from the “broaken leafe.”

23. Sisam, “Broken Leaf,” 342 and Hill, “Addenda,” 104.

24. A third possibility is just conceivable, that the quatrain was added at the stage of the compilation of J itself, and not derived from any J exemplar.

25. Sisam, “Broken Leaf,” 339ff; and see also Hill, “Addenda,” 101-02 and note 24.

26. C. Deedes, ed., Registrum Johannis de Pontissara, 2 vols., Canterbury and York Society 19 and 30 (London, 1915-24), I, 181.

27. A. W. Goodman, ed., Registrum Henrici Woodlock, 2 vols., Canterbury and York Society 43 and 44 (Oxford, 1940-41), II, 764, 769, and 779.

28. Goodman, Registrum Henrici Woodlock, II, 828.

29. On the poet's knowledge of civil and ecclesiastical law, see M. A. Witt, “The Owl and the Nightingale and English Law Court Procedure of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” ChauR [Chaucer Review] 16 (1981-82): 282-92. He considers that the poet was “acquainted with, even well-versed in judicial matters” (ibid., 282), though no exact parallel between the structure of the birds' debate and actual law-court procedure, whether civil or ecclesiastical, can be shown. Rather, the poem is given a competent legal “colouring”. A useful impression of the poet's cultural formation emerges in Barratt, “Flying in the Face of Tradition”, although I do not accept her thesis of female authorship.

30. W. A. Hinnebusch, The Early English Friars Preachers, Dissertationes Historicae 14 (Rome, 1951), 82-83.

31. For Guildford's religious establishments (chiefly, a hospital), see D. Knowles and R. N. Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses England and Wales, 2nd ed. (London, 1971); and for its parish churches, see H. E. Malden, ed., The Victoria History of the County of Surrey, 4 vols. plus Index (London, 1902-14), II, passim.

32. Malden, County of Surrey, II, 114.

33. Hinnebusch, English Friars Preachers, 460-69.

34. Barratt, “Flying in the Face of Tradition,” 474.

35. Hinnebusch, English Friars Preachers, 422-24.

36. The Dominicans had a strong tradition of canonists (the celebrated Raymond of Pennafort was one of their number, for example), nor was their interest in canon law confined to Continental brothers like him: Simon of Hinton, incumbent of the chair in theology at the University of Oxford from 1248, was another notable case (Hinnebusch, English Friars Preachers, 369-74).

37. H. R. Luard, ed., Roberti Grosseteste Episcopi quondam Lincolniensis Epistolæ, Rolls Series 25 (London, 1861), 61. Grosseteste regularly had two Dominicans and two Franciscans as members of his familia (Hinnebusch, English Friars Preachers, 449). Note again how in a letter of 1245 to Cardinal Hugh of St Cher Grosseteste declared that the Archbishop of Canterbury needed friars skilled in civil and canon law, in the law of the land and in the law of God (Luard, Epistolæ, 336).

38. B. Millett, “The Origins of Ancrene Wisse: New Answers, New Questions,” MÆ 61 (1992): 206-28.

39. A. J. Fletcher, “Black, White and Grey in Hali Meiðhad And Ancrene Wisse,” MÆ 62 (1993): 69-78.

40. Fletcher, “Hali Meiðhad and Ancrene Wisse,” 71.

41. For Ancrene Wisse resemblances, see Barratt, “Flying in the Face of Tradition,” 475. The resemblances with Hali Meiðhad, notably in the portrait of the Owl, are more arresting, and I am indebted to Neil Cartlidge for drawing them to my attention.

42. See Millett, “Origins,” passim.

43. D. N. Bell, ed., The Libraries of the Cistercians, Gilbertines and Premonstratensians, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues 3 (London, 1992), 249 (the manuscript in question bore the shelfmark Q.V.). Moreover, vitae of St Dominic may have been a comparative rarity; I have not noticed any others in medieval library catalogues published to date.

44. Goodman, Registrum Henrici Woodlock, II, 847. Note too a certain John of Titchfield being ordained subdeacon in Guildford on 20 December 1309 (Goodman, Registrum Henrici Woodlock, II, 828). Whether John of Titchfield was a canon of Titchfield is not noted, but a Titchfield-Guildford association is again evidenced.

45. The correspondences were first detected by R. M. Wilson, “The Medieval Library of Titchfield Abbey,” Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, Literary and Historical Section, 5 (1938-43): 150-77 and 252-76, and his “More Lost Literature II,” LeedsSE [Leeds Studies in English] 6 (1937): 30-49. The correspondences were amplified by subsequent scholars, and are usefully summarized by Cartlidge, “Composition and Social Context,” 251.

46. Cartlidge, ibid., 261.

47. For C, see Laing, Catalogue, 70; and for J, located quite precisely in the region of Ledbury, see A. McIntosh, M. L. Samuels, and M. Benskin, eds., A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediæval English, 4 vols. (Aberdeen, 1986), III, 171, LP 7440.

48. Cartlidge, “Date,” 235, discerns in the X exemplar, apart from scribes X1 and X2 who have generaily been recognized to have copied The Owl and the Nightingale, evidence of the activity of at least two further scribes, perhaps even of a third, who similarly wrote a West Midland dialect.

49. For example, Cartlidge, “Date,” 234: “while the poem's original language was probably a dialect of central southern England … its copies were certainly made some distance away in the West Midlands.”

50. McIntosh, Samuels, and Benskin, Linguistic Atlas, I, 13-19, contains a classic statement of scribal practice in these respects, and see also M. Laing, “Dialectal Analysis and Linguistically Composite Texts in Middle English,” in M. Laing, ed., Middle English Dialectology: Essays on Some Principles and Problems (Aberdeen, 1986), 150-69 and J. J. Smith, “Tradition and Innovation in South-West Midlands Middle English,” in F. Riddy, ed., Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts: Essays celebrating the publication of ‘A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English’ (Cambridge, Engl., 1991), 53-65.

51. H. M. Colvin, The White Canons in England (Oxford, 1951), 184.

52. Colvin, White Canons, 319.

53. Hill, “Addenda,” 103-04. They are the Shires and Hundreds of England, the Proverbs of Alfred, Poema Morale, and Anthem of St Thomas.

54. B. Hill, “The History of Jesus College, Oxford MS. 29”, MÆ 32 (1963): 203-13; see 212. Thus they began their commission in the diocese in which both Titchfield and Guildford are situated. But there is not even any certain evidence that Carne trawled for books in the way that some other Commissioners did.

55. C. Weinberg, “The Latin Marginal Glosses in the Caligula Manuscript of Laȝamon's Brut,” in F. Le Saux, ed., The Text and Tradition of Laȝamon's Brut, Arthurian Studies 33 (Cambridge, Engl., 1994), 103-20; see 114-15. Of course, just as Titchfield Abbey would have been well placed to receive texts from the southeast, it would have been well placed to receive texts from the west via the mother house in Halesowen. Laȝamon's Brut would be an obvious candidate for transmission along this route, and as Hill, “Addenda,” 103 and note 32, and others, have observed, perhaps the “Hystoria Britonum” contained in the lost Titchfield Abbey MS.C.II., before a “De conflictu inter philomenam et bubonem in anglicis,” was a copy of Laȝamon's Brut. Cartlidge, “Composition and Social Context,” 265, note 29, doubts this, saying that the lost “Hystoria Britonum” was much more likely to have been a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae, citing Ker, Facsimile, ix, note 4. But Ker, ibid., merely queries Geoffrey of Monmouth as a possibility. Whatever the truth of the matter, a copy of Laȝamon's Brut at Tichfield Abbey would not seem unlikely, given the abbey's connections with the West Midlands. For other texts in C and J with West Midland connections, see Cartlidge, “Composition and Social Context,” 250-51.

56. W. Page and R. B. Pugh, eds., The Victoria History of the County of Dorset, originally 3 vols., only 2 vols. published (London, 1908-68), II, 14.

57. Legatine constitutions of the thirteenth century were largely intolerant of the system of pluralities, the simultaneous holding of more than one benefice with cure of souls. Pluralities were, however, allowable on condition that due dispensations had been secured. Since the system had proponents at a high level (as, for example, Walter Cantilupe, bishop of Worcester from 1237 to 1266), its functioning was likely to continue, despite the best efforts of reforming bishops and archbishops to enforce the legatine constitutions. See D. L. Douie, Archbishop Pecham (Oxford, 1952), 98-113 and M. Gibbs and J. Lang, Bishops and Reform 1215-1272 (Oxford, 1934; reprt. 1962), 170-73.

58. As, for example, Cartlidge, “Composition and Social Context,” 256, interprets them.

59. The meaning which A. W. Baldwin, “Henry II and The Owl and the Nightingale,” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology] 66 (1967): 207-29, seems to read in this line (see 225-26).

60. For the case of Thomas, son of earl Ferrers, see Luard, Epistolæ, 151. The canonical ages were clearly stipulated in the Clementines (the body of canon law constitutions issued by Pope Clement V). These were the last constitutions to be officially introduced into the canon law corpus. See E. Friedberg, ed., Corpus Iuris Canonici, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1879; reprt. Graz, 1955), II, col. 1140 (Lib. 1, tit. vi, cap. iii).

61. Deedes, Registrum Johannis de Pontissara, I, xv, 264-65. I have not found his birth date, but the fact that Pecham referred to him as a “puer” may suggest a pre-pubescent child. Also, James of Spain is known to have died probably a little before 16 October 1332 (see Calendar of the Patent Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office … Edward III. A.D. 1330-1334 (London, 1893), 359), so the chance of his being a “little child” in 1282, the year of his presentation to Crondall, is indeed very high.

62. The Register of John le Romeyn, Lord Archbishop of York 1286-1296, 2 vols., Surtees Society 123 and 128 (Durham, London, and Berlin, 1913-17), I, 369. The circumstances of James of Spain's career are conveniently presented in A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1957-59), III, 1737.

63. Deeds, Registrum Johannis de Pontissara, I, 265.

64. Ibid., I, 265.

65. Edward I urged Burnell's election on the monks of Winchester. The election was subsequently quashed by Pope Nicholas III.

66. C. T. Martin, ed., Registrum Epistolarum Fratris Johannis Peckham Archiepiscopi Cantuariensis, Rolls Series 77, 3 vols. (London, 1882-85), II, 556.

67. But I should stress that I have found no case that provoked such comparable documented outrage as did Peter of Guildford's. The poem's stance on pluralities and preferment might be another indicator, incidentally, of a thirteenth- rather than a twelfth-century composition date.

68. The example that Cartlidge, “Date,” 234-35, chose to cite of rapid textual dissemination soon after composition is, interestingly, Ancrene Wisse, a text probably of Dominican origin.