SOURCE: Gray, Douglas. “Shorter Poems.” In Robert Henryson, pp. 241-71. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1979.

[In the following essay, Gray provides a comprehensive overview of Henryson's numerous shorter poems.]

The shorter poems attributed to Henryson are not as well known as they deserve to be.¹ They are poems which belong to well-established genres, and they are of uneven quality, but the best show the distinctive and bold handling of traditional form and material that we have come to expect. I begin with a trio of satirical poems, and—with some hesitation—with The Want of Wyse Men. It is, in fact, far from certain that this poem properly belongs to the canon. It is not attributed to Henryson in either of the surviving texts, but its association with Orpheus and Eurydice in a single Chepman and Myllar tract has convinced most editors of its genuineness.² In the attribution of this sort of conventional poetry, internal and stylistic evidence is of little or no value, but one might at least entertain the thought that the poem's learned reference to Saturn and to Octavian could suggest the hand of our poet. The Want of Wyse Men belongs to a favourite type of late medieval poetry, the general complaint on ‘abuses of the age’.³ It is not a type of poetry which usually excites the modern reader. He finds its satire too generalized (it is almost impossible not to agree with the poets' denunciations of wickedness or sin), and is quickly bored with catalogues of vices which become steadily less urgent and convincing. Medieval readers, however, seem to have been attracted by the type, and to have used it as a focus for their feelings about particular as well as general injustice. At the beginning of Book xvi of the Scotichronicon,⁴ Bower pauses to consider the instability of the kingdom, and the need for justice and the enforcement of the law (‘Jura enim publica certissime sunt humanae vitae solatia, infirmorum auxilia, tyrannorum frena; unde et securitas venit, et conscientia proficit’). Recalling the remarks of Ovid on the wickedness of the present, he is led to quote a Latin poem on the decline from the Golden Age:

Aurea tempora primaque robora praeterierunt.
Aurea gens fuit, et simul haec ruit, illa ruerunt …

and to continue with a personal application: ‘propter enim gemitus inopum et miserias pauperum, quos etiam ego, qui haec scribo, praesenti et eodem die vidi et audivi, in proximo et in confinibus meis pauperes denudari vestibus et utensilibus inhumaniter spoliari …’. A quotation from Ecclesiastes comes into his mind, and he concludes by moving from prophetic complaint to just such a general poem on the abuses of the time:

Unde et ego, aeque ut in Trenis Jeremias, idiomate varians, celeumata de cordis penetralibus erumpere cogor, et dicere compellor:

Lauch liis down our all: fallax fraus regnat ubique.
Micht gerris richt down fall: regnum quia rexit inique.
Treuth is made now thrall: spernunt quam dico plerique.
Bot til Christ we call, periemus nos animique.

The Want of Wyse Men immediately announces the great confusion of a world turned upside down:⁵

Me ferlyis of this grete confusioun;
I wald sum clerk of connyng walde declerde,
Quhat gerris this warld be turnyt up so doun.
Thare is na faithfull fastnes founde in erde;
Now ar noucht thre may traistly trow the ferde;
Welth is away, and wit is worthin wrynkis …

The idea of the decline from that age which ‘for gudely governance’ was called ‘goldin’ (Saturn—here in his rôle as the bringer of civilization and plenty—and Octavian are the exemplary rulers who maintain peace and order) is continued in a little scene, faintly reminiscent of Piers Plowman, in which the wisdom of the past is slighted by the folly of the present—he who knows ‘placebo and noucht half dirige’ can come in, while Aristotle, Austin and Ambrose ‘stand at the dure’. From time to time, the poem shows signs of losing itself in the disparate manifestations of wickedness, but it is held together by the dominant themes of disorder, of lack of balance—

All ledis lyvis lawles at libertee
Noucht reulit be reson, mare than ox or asse

—and by their contrasting ideals, of ‘sad maturitie’, ‘prudence and policy’. There are moments when the overwhelming threat of the abuses of the age is strongly felt:

Now wrang hes warrane, and law is bot wilfulness;
Quha hes the war is worthin on him all the wyte,
For trewth is tressoun, and faith is fals fekilness;
Gylle is now gyd, and vane lust is also delyte …

As in Bower's poem, the conclusion is a sad ‘bot til Christ we call’; a final prayer beseeches the lord of lords to reform ‘all thir sayd thingis’, ‘as thou best thinkis’. Dullness is redeemed by some vigorous homely lines—‘into godis neiss it stinkis’, or the proverbial refrain ‘want of wyse men makis fulis sitt on binkis’.⁶

Another poem against ‘fals titlaris’⁷ (usually called Aganis Haisty Credence of Titlaris) is advice to a lord, the traditional wisdom of the ‘mirrors’ for princes:

Ane worthy lord sowld wey ane taill wyslie,
The tailltellar, and quhome of it is tald;
Gif it be said for luve, or for invy …

It is a plea for prudence and justice; tale-bearers are motivated by envy, and harm the innocent. It rises to a rhetorical flourish:

O wicket tung, sawand dissentioun,
Of fals taillis to tell that will not tyre,
Moir perrellus than ony fell pusoun,
The pane of hell thow sall haif to thi hyre.

More convincing expression of the dangers of tale-tellers and flatterers can be found elsewhere in medieval literature, in set descriptions (as in The Ancrene Riwle) or in stories such as The Manciple's Tale which demonstrate dramatically that ‘a wikked tonge is worse than a feend’. Henryson's poem, however, moves to a strong ending with three vivid images of the backbiter:

Thre personis severall he slayis with ane wowrd—
Himself, the heirar, and the man saiklace.
Within ane hude he hes ane dowbill face,
Ane bludy tung, undir a fair pretence …

If these two poems are hardly outstanding examples of their kind, the third, “Sum Practysis of Medecyne,”⁸ although it presents considerable linguistic difficulty, has a dazzling verve and vigour that is worthy of Dunbar. Some of the ‘practices’ of medieval medicine were bizarre enough in their own right:⁹

For eyen that er sore: sethe the rede snayl in water, and geder of the grese and anoynt thin eyen therwith … For the fallyng evel: Tak a yong urchy[n] and roste him to poudre; and of the doust put on thy mete; and drynke the melke of a woman that hath the ferst chyld.

‘Urine of a child innocent and mayden’ was part of a remedy for ‘all evils of eyes’; part of an ointment for gout consisted of ‘the grece of a bor and the grece of a ratoun and cattys grece and voxis grece and horsgrece and the grece of a broke’, with herbs and ‘a litel lynnesed’. Not surprisingly, the idea of a burlesque prescription or ‘recipe’ had occurred to other writers, as in this ‘good medycyn for sor eyen’:

For a man that is almost blynd:
Lat hym go barhed all day ageyn the wynd
          Tyll the so[n]ne be sette;
At evyn wrap hym in a cloke,
And put hym in a hows full of smoke,
          And loke that every hol be well shett.
And whan hys eyen begynne to rope,
Fyll hem full of brynston and sope,
          And hyll hym well and warme;
And yf he se not by the next mone
As well at mydnyght as at none
          I schal lese my ryght arme.(10)

Nearer, perhaps, to Henryson's more inventive and fantastic burlesque are some suggestions for ‘a good medesyn yff a mayd have lost her madenhed to make her a mayd ayeyn’: she should be laid in an ‘esy bed’ in a ‘hot hows’, and fed well with chickens and gruel, and other medicinal foods such as the ‘neighing of a mare’ and ‘gnattys smere’—

… She must have allso
The oyll of a mytys too
With the kreke of a henne,
And the lyghte of a glawworme in the derke,
With ix skyppys of a larke,
And the lanche of a wrenne,
She must have of the wyntyrs nyghte
.vii. myle of the mone-lych[t]
Fast knyt in a bladder:
Ye must medyl ther among
vii Wellsshemens song,
And hang yt on a lader;
She must have the left fot of an ele,
Wyth the krekynge of a cart-whele,
Wele hoylyd on a herdyll;
Ye must caste ther upon
The mary of a whetstone,
And the lenthe of Judas gerdylle.(11)

Such poems, like Henryson's “Practysis,” are of course part of a larger body of satire directed against doctors and apothecaries. The excessive public veneration which the medical profession now enjoys is a relatively recent development. In earlier times, its ways with patients were a favourite target.¹² In one Middle English proverb a painter becomes a physician because where once his errors could be seen by all, now they could be safely hidden beneath the ground. ‘On dit un proverbe, d'ordinaire: Après la mort le médecin; mais vous verrez que si je m'en mêle, on dira: Après le médecin, gare la mort!’—the suspicion that physicians, instead of fighting the good fight against death, were in fact its agents, recurs throughout the centuries from Langland's ‘murderers are many leeches’, to Heywood's apothecary (‘for when ye fele your conscyens redy, / I can sende you to heven quyckly’), to M. Purgon (‘M. Purgon est un homme qui a huit mille bonnes livres de rente’. Toinette. ‘Il faut qu'il ait tué bien des gens pour s'être fait si riche’), and beyond. In the eyes of satirists, their remedies, as well as being often lethal, were sometimes of a drastic simplicity. Poggio has a merry tale of a physician who gave purgative pills to all and sundry, even (quite successfully) to a man who wanted to find his ass; the budding doctor in Le Malade Imaginaire gives the correct answer in his ‘examination’:

… Quas remedia eticis,
Pulmonicis atque asmaticis
Trovas a propas facere?
BACHELIERUS
Clysterium donare,
Postea seignare,
Ensuita purgare.

The impenetrable jargon of doctors and apothecaries constantly provoked satire. Heywood's apothecary offers his wares like an itinerant huckster:

Here be other: as diosfialios
Blanka manna, diospoliticon,
Mercury sublyme, and metridaticon,
Pelitory, and arsefetita,
Cassy, and colloquintita.
These be the thynges that breke all stryfe
Betwene mannes sycknes and his lyfe.
From all payne these shall you delever,
And set you even at reste for ever!(13)

Incompetent or quack doctors are stock figures of folly. In The Ship of Fools Brant ridicules those who test a patient's urine, and take so long in searching through their books for an answer that the unfortunate victim dies.¹⁴ In the ‘Cure of Folly’, Bosch shows a doctor wearing a fool's cap operating on a foolish patient's head, cutting out the ‘stone of folly’.

Medieval medical satire is crude and sharp, and Henryson's “Practysis” is no exception. It is no gentle leg-pulling exercise;¹⁵ rather, its violent and wild language suggests a ‘flyting’ of the kind we find in Dunbar or Skelton. Its violence and fantasy seem to be the expression of an extraordinary urge to cast off the bonds of normal language and of good sense, but in fact what seems to be a wilful abandonment of the poet's usual delicate rhetorical technique and control of register in favour of a joyously wasteful exuberance turns out to be an artful—if Rabelaisian—choice. Verbal fantasy, parody, and crude invective do more than afford entertainment.¹⁶ The flood of words expresses the anger of the poet, and at the same time creates a mirror of the folly of the victim. Petrarch's Invectiva contra medicum¹⁷ defends rhetoric, humanism, and the feigned fables of poets against the real lies of some physicians, but Henryson here ignores such abstract questions, and proceeds directly to a personal attack:

Guk, guk, gud day, ser, gaip quhill ye get it,
Sic greting may gane weill gud laik in your hude
Ye wald deir me, I trow, because I am dottit,
To ruffill me with a ryme …

The tone is not far from Skelton's ‘Gup, gorbellyd Godfrey, gup Garnesche gaudy fool!’¹⁸ The railing opening implies a situation, and an opponent to whom Henryson speaks in ‘greeting’. The offending ‘ryme’ is dismissed:

Your saying I haif sene, and on syd set it,
As geir of all gadering, glaikit, nocht gude …

and the attack turns to the opponent's incompetence in medicine—‘your cunnyng in to cure / Is clowtit and clampit …’. The poetic defence of ‘my prettick in pottingary’ becomes a kind of vaunt, which rises in crescendo:

Is nowdir fevir, nor fell, that our the feild fure,
Seiknes nor sairness, in tyme gif I seid,
But I can lib thame and leiche thame fra lame and lesure. …

He obligingly sends a ‘schedule’, containing four ‘physics’, to cure his opponent's malice. The first, for the ‘colic’, includes such laxatives as laurean (laurel) and culrage (arsesmart); excrement figures prominently, and the tone—as befits a flyting—is deliberately crude and vulgar—‘the crud of my culome with your teith crakit’. The poet's fantasy begins to work; in the midst of lists of herbs he recommends

The hair of the hurcheoun nocht half deill hakkit,
With snowt of ane selch, ane swelling to swage.

The next ‘physic’—‘to latt yow to sleip’—becomes even more marvellously fantastic. ‘Recipe’ (the common opening in such ‘recipes’)—

Recipe, thre ruggis of the reid ruke,
The gant of ane gray meir, the claik of ane guss,
The dram of ane drekterss, the douk of ane duke,
The gaw of ane grene dow, the leg of ane lowss,
Fyve unce of ane fle wing, the fyn of ane fluke,
With ane sleiffull of slak, that growis in the sluss;
Myng all thir in ane mass with the mone cruke …

The mad precision of ‘fyve unce’ is a nice touch. This concoction, steeped with red nettle seed ‘in strang wesch’ is to be used ‘for to bath your ba cod’. By the time we reach the third ‘physic’, alliterative impossibilia are pouring out with surrealist zest:

… sevin sobbis of ane selche, the quhidder of ane quhaill,
The lug of ane lempet is nocht to forsaik,
The harnis of ane haddok, hakkit or haill,
With ane bustfull of blude of the scho bak …

Prescribed for the cough are (inter alia) ‘ane grit gowpene of the gowk fart’ and ‘ane unce of ane oster’ ‘Annoyntit with nurice doung, for it is rycht nyce / Myngit with mysdirt and with mustart’. At last, the poet takes his leave:

Gud nycht, guk, guk, for sa I began,
I haif no come at this tyme longer to tarry

—and he closes with instructions for the gathering of the herbs (‘in ane gude oure’, as would have been customary) and for the administering of the medicine:

Ser, minister this medecyne at evin to sum man,
And or pryme be past, my powder I pary,
They sall bliss yow, or ellis bittirly yow ban;
For it sall fle thame, in faith, out of the fary:
Bot luk quhen ye gadder thir gressis and gerss,
Outhir sawrand or sour,
That it be in ane gude oure:
It is ane mirk mirrour,
Ane uthir manis erss.

Where “Sum Practysis” is an extraordinary expression of ‘the exuberance, wildness and eccentricity of the Middle Ages’, the shorter religious and moral poems exhibit those qualities which Edwin Muir found characteristic of ‘the fundamental seriousness, humanity and strength of the Scottish imagination’. Even here, however, there is considerable variety. “The Annunciation”¹⁹ is in its own way as bold an experiment as “Sum Practysis of Medecyne.” The best-known of the English medieval lyrics on this favourite topic, ‘I sing of a maiden that is makeles’, is a masterpiece of simplicity which makes its effects by an unobtrusive precision of detail and by the careful and elegant evocation of emotional undertones. Henryson's poem is totally different; it is dramatic and sometimes flamboyant, and prefers abstraction to detail. It is an elaborate metrical and rhythmical artifact, which has to be read aloud for its effect to be felt. He uses only two rhymes in each stanza, and the b-rhyme is carried on throughout the whole poem. As this is on -is, it produces an almost breathless series of present tenses, which express very appropriately the surging movement of the poem. Alliteration (sometimes in intricate patterns) gives a meaningful emphasis: Mary ‘wox in hir chaumer chaist with child’. There is no sense of strain: the poem is a triumphant metrical performance. Simple conventional epithets (‘myld Mary’) and formulaic phrases (‘barret betis’) are in nice contrast to the virtuosity of the form.

Henryson sees the Annunciation as a drama of love. He begins boldly:

Forcy as deith is likand lufe,
Throuch quhome al bittir suet is,
No thing is hard, as writ can pruf,
Till him in lufe that letis,
Luf us fra barret betis.

The proverbial ‘love is as strong as death’²⁰ had been often used in devotional or mystical texts from the time of Rolle; Henryson characteristically extends it by paradox. The sententia is exemplified by the narrative which follows—the story of Gabriel's coming, the announcement, Mary's wonder and silence ‘as weill afeirit’. Interestingly, Henryson chooses not to give Mary that well-known answer which was the germ of so many Annunciation poems, but allows it to be assumed in the fine and suggestive line ‘brichtnes fra bufe aboundis’. His treatment is not visual; he does not encourage us to imagine the scene as the writer of a prose meditation might well have done. Yet his curious blend of abstraction and dynamic narrative is remarkably successful. Gabriel ‘glidis’ back to heaven, and leaves the Virgin ‘blith with barne’. The poet's exclamation:

O worthy wirschip singuler,
To be moder and madyn meir,
As cristin faith confidis;
That borne was of hir sidis,
Our maker goddis sone so deir,
Quhilk erd, wattir, and hevinnis cleir
Throw grace and virtu gidis

signals a return to the ‘sentence’ of the opening lines, and to a meditation on the significance of the great event. The traditional paradoxes—that Mary is both mother and maiden, and that she, a humble creature, bore the creator of all things—are deftly turned. In the following stanza we are reminded of three miracles of love: the bush burning but unconsumed which Moses saw, the dry wand of Aaron which flowered, Gideon's fleece which was moist with dew though the earth around it remained dry. They are, of course, traditional figures of the Virgin Birth, but they are handled with virtuosity. A bold image introduces them:

The miraclis ar mekle and meit,
Fra luffis ryver rynnis(21)

—and immediately, the burning bush of Moses is identified with the fire of love—

The low of luf haldand the hete,
Unbrynt full blithlie birnis. …

Even more boldly, Henryson goes on to remind us explicitly of the omnitemporal present in the eyes of God; for Him these miracles occur at the same moment:

Quhen Gabriell beginnis
With mouth that gudely may to grete
The wand of Aarone, dry but wete,
To burioun nocht blynnis …

‘The here and now’, says Erich Auerbach, ‘is no longer a mere link in an earthly chain of events, it is simultaneously something which has always been, and which will be fulfilled in the future; and strictly, in the eyes of God, it is something eternal, something omnitemporal, something already consummated in the realm of fragmentary earthly event.’²² When Gabriel speaks, it is the fulfilment of these figures of the event in what mortals regard as earlier history, but the fulfilment coexists with its ‘shadows’. We suddenly realize that the insistent present tenses of the poem are more than a simple expression of its own forward movement. The great event, the expression of love, takes place in time, and subsumes its shadows. We have been shown it diachronically in a sequential narrative, and synchronically, as an expression of the ‘being’ of love. Henryson goes on to tell us that this great expression of love will be perfectly fulfilled in the sacrifice of Christ. Here he lapses into a rather weak rehearsal of the later significant events of Christ's life, but his poem revives with a final prayer to the Virgin—

O lady lele and lusumest,
Thy face moist fair and schene is!—

as the highest human expression of love, and as the eternal queen of heaven:

This prayer fra my splene is,
That all my werkis wikkitest
Thow put away, and mak me chaist
Fra Termigant that teyn is,
And fra his cluke that kene is;
And syne till hevin my saule thou haist,
Quhar thi makar of michtis mast
Is kyng, and thow thair quene is.

Henryson's two poems on old age are not as spectacular as this, but they are none the less interesting. In medieval religious lyrics, old age is usually a topic which is the occasion for a grim memento mori. Old men speak with warning voices to the young:

Now age is croppyn on me ful styll,
He makyt me hore, blake and bowe;
I goo all dounward with the hylle …
Now ys this day commyn to the nyght;
I have lost my lewying;
A dredfull payne ys for me dyght,
In cold claye therein to clynge …(23)

“The Ressoning betuix Aige and Youth” begins with a lyrical chanson d'aventure opening, and presents a simple contrast between Youth, the ‘mirry man’, singing sweetly his refrain ‘O yowth, be glaid in to thy flowris grene’, and Age, ‘a cative on ane club’, whose appearance is reminiscent of the Saturn of the Testament

… a cative on ane club cumand,
With cheikis clene and lyart lokis hoir;
His ene was how, his voce was hess hostand,
Wallowit richt wan, and waik as ony wand.

On his breast he has a ‘bill’ (perhaps he can no longer sing) with this ‘legend’: ‘O youth, thy flowris fedis fellone sone’. Youth's confidence in his strength and beauty is brash, but endearing; it is sombrely answered by Age:

Thy fleschely lust thow salt also defy,
And pane the sall put fra paramour;
Than will no bird be blyth of the in bouir;
Quhen thy manheid sall mynnis as the mone,
Thow sall assay gif that my song be sour:
O youth, thy flowris fedis fellone sone!(24)

Tactfully, Henryson does not award victory to either; they go their different ways, and we are left with their two refrains—‘O yowth, be glaid into thy flowris grene!’, ‘O yowth, thy flowris faidis fellone sone’. In The Praise of Age, the old man, though ‘decrepit’, can sing gaily and clearly ‘The more of age the nerar hevynnis blis’. The disorders of the world come from ‘covatise’, but he is content to be safe from the perils of youth. He represents the other traditional aspect of age—contentment and wisdom—and rejoices in his old age because it brings him closer to God. This is a note which is rare—though not unique—in medieval English lyrics.²⁵

The Abbay Walk²⁶ is a simple and eloquent example of that kind of medieval poem in which the poet comes upon an inscription with some startling message. In this case it is written as a titulus on the wall of an abbey (there seems to be no need to think of Dunfermline in particular):

On caiss I kest on syd myne e,
And saw this writtin upoun a wall:
‘Off quhat estait, man, that thow be,
Obey and thank thy god of all.’

The titulus continues for the remaining six stanzas, giving traditional topics of consolation for those in adversity—‘blame nocht thy lord’, but accept tribulation in humanity, learn patience from Job, and ignore the vanity of the world. The message is driven home by the refrain ‘Obey and thank thy god of all’.

The shadows of the great plagues of the Middle Ages may sometimes be seen in the literature and art of the time.²⁷ The terror of the plague is brilliantly evoked by the description of the stricken city of Florence at the beginning of the Decameron, or the drawing by Dürer (who was probably forced to leave Nüremberg in 1505 because of pestilence) of Death as King of the plague, riding a gaunt horse with a cowbell strung around its neck. Humbler memorials are the many prayers (both prose and verse) against the plague, or the chapels or images of saints whose help was invoked, such as St. Roch, who had a chapel dedicated to him in Edinburgh. Popular images common in German prints (the so-called Pestblätter) often show the Virgin Mary protecting suppliants under her mantle from the arrows of a wrathful God. So strong is the faith in the immanent justice of God that the popular devotional attitude is that the plague is allowed to come as a punishment for sin (though possibly one may wonder if the insistence on this suggests the existence of a less pious reaction, and of a need for reassurance). The later chronicler, Pitscottie, describing the ‘pestilence without mercy’ of 1439, says that it was accompanied by a great dearth sent by ‘the verie wraith and yre of god to caus ws knaw our sellfis and throcht that scourge to provock to amendiment of lyffe’, but goes on to lament that ‘albeit thir thrie plaigues and scwrges [war, famine and pestilence] rang amangis ws yit nevertheless sum men meid thame nevir to amend thair lyffis bot rather became daylie worss, dyveris utheris that pleinyeit upone the enormiteis that thay sustenit gat litill or na redres, quhairfoir the peopill began to warie and curs that evir it chanceit theme to leiwe in sick wicked and dangerous tymes’.²⁸

Henryson's Ane Prayer for the Pest is a simple prayer addressed to God, ‘of power infinyt’. The traditional theological view is put with grave clarity in the first stanza: ‘thow dois na wrang to puneiss our offens’. The justice of God, who is all-powerful and all-wise, is not to be questioned; suffering mortals may appeal only to his mercy:

Bot thow with rewth our hairtis recreat,
We ar bot deid but only thy clemens.

The petition ‘Preserve us fra this perrelus pestilens’ is repeated as a refrain in the first five stanzas, and echoed in the following three. We would be glad, says the poet, if God could punish our sins by some other tribulation—by death or sickness, or hunger:

Wer it thy will, O lord of hevin, allaiss,
That we sowld thus be haistely put doun,
And dye as beistis without confessioun. …

The traditional ideas—the fearful justice of God, the admission of sin, the plea for that mercy given expression by a cruel death on the Cross—are woven together with solemn eloquence:

Haif mercy, lord, haif mercy, hevynis king!
Haif mercy of thy pepill penetent;
Haif mercy of our petouss punissing;
Retreit the sentence of thy just jugement
Aganis us synnaris, that servis to be schent:
Without mercy, we ma mak no defens.
Thow that, but rewth, upoun the rude was rent,
Preserve us frome this perrellus pestilens.

As the poem proceeds, the emphasis shifts dramatically from one to the other. Stanza 6, for instance, is a vehement plea to the mercy shown in man's redemption, but ends with a sudden recalling of our ‘ingratitude’:

… Haif rewth, Lord, of thyne awin symilitude;
Puneiss with pety and nocht with violens.
We knaw it is for our ingratitude
That we ar puneist with this pestilence,

which becomes penitential in the following stanzas:

Thow grant us grace for till amend our miss,
And till evaid this crewall suddane deid.

The fearsome justice of God is seen as a pattern for justice on earth, in a society which is dangerously inadequate. ‘Bot wald the heiddismen that sowld keip the law / Pueneiss the peple for their transgressioun’, then there would be no need for such manifestations of divine justice. The last three stanzas have a different refrain—‘latt nocht be tynt that thow so deir hes bocht’—, a touch of the aureate diction that Dunbar was to perfect, and a very bold metrical experiment in which each of the first seven lines of the eight-line stanzas generates three internal rhymes. It is as if we are suddenly transported to the ‘greater glory and splendour’ of Rosslyn Chapel. The effect is that of an exhilaratingly ornamented crescendo, at once an urgent and persuasive plea for mercy, and a paean of praise to the glory and justice of God:

Superne, lucerne, guberne this pestilens,
Preserve, and serve that we not sterve thairin.
Declyne that pyne be thy devyne prudens.
O trewth, haif rewth, lat not our slewth us twin.
Our syt full tyt, wer we contryt, wald blin.
Dissiver did never quha evir the besocht.
Send grace with space, and us imbrace fra syn.
Latt nocht be tynt that thow so deir hes bocht …
… Sen for our vyce that justyce mon correct,
O king most hie, now pacifie thy feid:
Our syn is huge; refuge we not suspect;
As thow art juge, deluge us of this dreid.
In tyme assent, or we be schent with deid;
We us repent, and tyme mispent forthocht:
Thairfoir, evirmoir, be gloir to thy godheid;
Lat nocht be tynt that thou sa deir hes bocht.

In Petronius's Satiricon, in the description of the lavish feast given by Trimalchio, there is an odd incident:

‘… As we drank … a slave brought in a silver skeleton, made so that its limbs and spine could be moved and bent in every direction. He put it down once or twice on the table so that the supple joints showed several attitudes, and Trimalchio said appropriately: ‘Alas for us poor mortals, all that poor man is nothing. So we shall all be, after the world below takes us away. Let us live then while it goes well with us.’”²⁹

Although the Carpe diem is usually firmly suppressed, a good deal of this grotesque and sometimes gruesomely playful spirit survives into the later medieval macabre tradition. The sight of skeletons, the warning cry of ‘sic erimus cuncti’ recur often enough for us to wish to echo Falstaff's ‘Peace, good Doll! do not speak like a death's head: do not bid me remember mine end …’. Sometimes the thought of death is intensified by an emphasis on the facts of physical decay or on the grisly end of the body in hell (‘… And for thi crisp kell, and fair hair, all bellit sall thou be; / And as for wild and wanton luk, nothing sall thou se …’³⁰), sometimes by a dramatic encounter, in which the living person is confronted by a dead man, a skeleton, or a skull, or the figure of Death. The play of Everyman, of course, is a well-known example. Skelton's Upon a Deedman's Heed, or the legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead, in which three living men are confronted by the horrible spectacle of three dead, are different variations. Henryson's “Thre Deid Pollis” combines both techniques. We have seen enough of the poet's grim imagination to expect something of a tour de force in this style, and we are not disappointed. The three skulls deliver their traditional warning (‘as ye ar now, into this warld we wair’) with macabre detail in stark Scots diction:

                    Behold oure heidis thre,
Oure holkit ene, oure peilit pollis bair …

They go on to remind us (again in traditional manner) that the time and place of death are ever uncertain. Their warning to ‘wantoune yowth’ is much more gruesome than that of Age in the poem previously discussed:

                                                  … O lusty gallandis gay,
Full laithly thus sall ly thy lusty heid,
Holkit and how, and wallowit as the weid,
Thy crampand hair, and eik thy cristall ene. …(31)

And, as is usual in this kind of poetry, the decay of female beauty is not spared. Villon poses the question:

Corps femenin, qui tant es tendre,
Poly, souef, si precieux,
Te fauldra il ces maux attendre?
Oy, ou tout vif aller es cieulx.(32)

Henryson's ‘deid pollis’ address the ladies in their splendid array:

O ladeis quhyt, in claithis corruscant,
Poleist with perle, and mony pretius stane;
With palpis quhyt, and hals so elegant,
Sirculit with gold, and sapheris mony ane;
Your finyearis small, quhyt as quhailis bane,
Arrayit with ringis, and mony rubeis reid:
As we ly thus sall ye ly ilk ane,
With peilit pollis, and holkit thus your heid.

The repetition of words such as ‘peilit’ and ‘holkit’ has a peculiarly sinister effect. From the terrible anonymity of death, they put the inescapable ‘questioun’—who can now tell ‘quha was farest, or fowlest, of us three? / or quhilk of us of kin was gentillar?’, that question which so absorbed Villon, the great master of the macabre:

Quant je considere ces testes
Entassees en ces charniers,
Tous furent maistres des requestes,
Au moins de la Chambre aux Deniers,
Ou tous furent portepanniers:
Autant puis l'ung que l'autre dire,
Car d'evesques ou lanterniers
Je n'y congnois riens a redire.(33)

After this reminder of the grimly reductive power of death, the three ‘pollis’ conclude with a call to repentance and to prayer for their souls.

Even more impressive, and certainly more attractive, is “The Ressoning betuix Deth and Man.” This dramatic encounter is not set in any temporal or spatial background, and, as in some versions of the Dance of Death, this absence of particular detail seems to heighten the emotional effect, for the encounter seems to take place in a kind of absolute time and place. The matter is quite traditional—all men must die, death levels all estates, and so on—but the debate is conducted with a genuinely dramatic sense. Death opens with a solemn and forceful speech:

‘O mortall man, behold, tak tent to me
Quhilk sowld thy mirror be baith day and nicht. …’

His stanza is one long, dignified, and elegant sentence. The sedate lists which are prominent are not simply devices for maintaining this register, but gently, yet inevitably, remind us of his absolute and unlimited power:

‘All erdly thing that euir tuik lyfe mon die:
Paip, empriour, king, barroun, and knycht,
Thocht thay be in thair roall stait and hicht,
May not ganestand, quhen I pleiss schute the derte;
Waltownis, castellis, and towris nevir so wicht,
May nocht risist quhill it be at his herte!’

Man's first reaction is that of ignorance—‘quhat art thow that biddis me thus tak tent …’. He launches into a series of questions (in strong contrast to the flowing dignity of Death's speech) which ends, realistically, with a defiant vaunt:

Is non so wicht, or stark in this cuntre,
Bot I sall gar him bow to me on forss.

The solemn introduction of his interlocutor's name—

My name, forswth, sen that thou speiris,
Thay call me Deid …

—has an immediate and a sobering effect. Man's thoughts begin to turn to penitence (and his phrases become rather more homiletic). When Death calls on Man to repent, we notice that his tone has nothing of the macabre raillery of the Dance of Death, and that he does not need to resort to the horrific details of putrefaction. The grim remark

Dispone thy self and cum with me in hy,
Edderis, askis, and wormis meit for to be

is as far as he goes. Nor does he need to offer any physical threat:

Cum quhen I call, thow ma me not denny
Thocht thow war paip, empriour, and king all thre.

Perhaps the nearest visual equivalent to this scene is not to be found in the contortions of Death and his victims in the Dance of Death, but in the ‘Death and Youth’ of the fifteenth-century Hausbuch Master, where a fashionably dressed youth, with an elegant and infinitely sorrowful face, is gently but firmly taken by Death. At Death's feet, we can see a toad and an adder. As Panofsky says ‘… the theme of Death and Youth was very common in late medieval art, but it is only in this drypoint by the Housebook Master that Death appears as a mystery, awesome yet kindly, threatening yet alluring, merciless yet full of pity’.³⁴ Henryson's ending, too, is surprisingly gentle and humane. Confronted by Death confident in his absolute power, Man rejects this ‘wretched world’, and offers himself humbly to Death's covering cloak:

‘Sen it is swa fra the I may not chaip,
This wrechit warld for me heir I defy,
And to the, Deid, to lurk under thy caip,
I offer me with hairt richt hum[i]ly;
Beseiking god, the divill, myne ennemy,
No power haif my sawill till assay.
Jesus, on the, with peteous voce, I cry,
Mercy on me to haif on Domisday.

The shorter poems include two allegorical pieces. That which is now called The Garmont of Gud Ladies³⁵ is a curious, but rather charming work, with a ballad-like metre setting off its finished and deliberate simplicity. It opens:

Wald my lady lufe me best,
And wirk eftir my will,
I suld ane garmond gudliest
Gar mak hir body till.
Off he honour suld be hir hud,
Upoun hir heid to weir,
Garneist with governance so gud,
Na demyng suld hir deir

—and goes on to furnish the lady with a complete allegorical outfit. It has been suggested that Henryson took the idea from Olivier de la Marche's Le Triumphe des Dames, but this work is longer, more elaborate, and not at all closely similar in detail. The allegorization of clothes would come easily to a medieval writer, not only because of Biblical examples or hints (e.g. Ephesians vi, 13-18, I Timothy ii, 9-10), but because in life as well as in books, clothes could be signs—for instance the vestments of priests could be given allegorical meanings. Caxton's Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry tells us of ‘the sygnefyaunce of the armes of a knyght’ (his helmet is ‘shamefastnes’, his habergeon a ‘castel and fortresse ayeynst vyces and deffaultes’, his gorget obedience, and so on).³⁶ Allegorical significances were attached to the distinctive items of a pilgrim's clothing. The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man gives its pilgrim some allegorical armour—his doublet is patience, his habergeon is ‘force’ (‘whiche Jesu Cristes champiouns wereden in old time’), his helm ‘attemperance’, his targe prudence, etc. Sartorial imagery is used almost as a matter of course—in Langland, for instance, Haukyn's ‘best cote’ is soiled with sin. Henryson's poem is rather more than an ingenious list of significances. A dominant idea running through it is that this ‘gudliest garment’ is one of true and noble love—the lady's kirtle, for instance, is ‘of clene constance / Lasit with lesum lufe’. One suspects also that there is perhaps an implied contrast with those fashionable and flashy women's clothes which are the target of moralists and satirists.³⁷ Moreover, in this case in a very real sense, ‘clothes make the woman’. In ordinary life one would expect them to reveal the personality of the wearer rather than her soul. Here, however, quite happily, they are signs both of her outward virtues and of her inner nobility of soul. A single piece of colour symbolism seems to have a special importance:

Hir sark suld be hir body nixt,
Of chestitie so quhyt,
With schame and dreid togidder mixt,
The same suld be perfyt.

Other items have a protective as well as a symbolic function, for instance,

Hir mantill of humilitie,
To tholl bayth wind and weit

or her shoes of ‘sickernes’, ‘in syne that scho nocht slyd’. But although the complete ‘garment’ is an ideal one, it is not ascetic. Both visually and morally it is attractive; her gown is ‘purfillit with plesour … / Furrit with fyne fassoun’, and she has the elegant ‘extras’ of the nobility such as the gloves³⁸ (‘of gud govirnance’). It is a ‘gay’ garment:

Wald scho put on this garmond gay
I durst sweir by my seill,
That scho woir nevir grene nor gray
That set hir half so weill.

The “Bludy Serk” is a short conte moralisé, an example of that group of stories which tell of Christ the lover-knight who gives his life to rescue a lady, man's soul.³⁹ It is, as far as we know, Henryson's only excursion into the world of romance, and, interestingly, it is the world of popular romance that he chooses, the world, one imagines, of ‘Watschod the tale tellare’ and of the ‘tua fithelaris that sang Graysteil to the King’. From the beginning the formulaic patterns⁴⁰ and the conventional diction are used with relish:

This hindir yeir I hard be tald
Thair was a worthy king;
Dukis, erlis, and barronis bald
He had at his bidding.
The lord was anceane and ald,
And sexty yeiris cowth ring;
He had a douchter fair to fald,
A lusty lady ying …

The tale continues with traditional ingredients: ‘adventures’, chivalric self-sacrifice, love ‘paramour’—and a terrible giant:

He wes the laithliest on to luk
That on the ground mycht gang;
His nailis wes lyk ane hellis cruk,
Thairwith fyve quarteris lang …

At its best the narrative has the pace and the touching simplicity of a good popular romance:

Syne brak the bour, had hame the bricht,
Unto hir fadir deir;
Sa evill wondit was the knycht
That he behuvit to de.
Unlusum was his likame dicht,
His sark was all bludy;
In all the warld was thair a wicht
So peteouss for to sy?

The knight's instructions to his lady to hang his ‘bludy sark’ before her, and to think of it and of him when she is wooed, and the way this vow is carried out is made into a simple romantic scene, which delicately emphasizes the magic power of the garment and of true love.⁴¹ This is deftly turned to a moral conclusion:

Sa weill the lady luvit the knycht,
That no man wald scho tak.
Sa suld we do our god of micht,
That did all for us mak;
Quhilk fullely to deid wes dicht
For sinfull manis saik …

and a moralitas briefly and simply explains the allegorical significance of the story.

It is appropriate to end with a work which not only illustrates Henryson's powers of dramatic narrative at their best, and which is one of those miniature stories which express multum in parvo, but which is also—in the best spirit of the ‘unbent bow’—a work of delightful and complete gaiety and wit. Robene and Makene may perhaps be described as a ‘pastoral ballad’, but in fact it defies categorization.⁴² The names of the characters are those common in the French pastourelle, and indeed one pastourelle by Baudes de la Kakerie (in Bartsch's collection of Romanzen und Pastourellen) has been claimed as its source. The similarities here are not close enough to be convincing, but in a general way Robene and Makene does seem to be related to the tradition of the pastourelle. There are some obvious differences: the pastourelle normally opens as a chanson d'aventure. In a common type, the poet-chevalier comes upon a shepherdess, pleads with her for love, and is often successful in his pleas. There is nothing of this in Robene and Makene; nor does Henryson's poem have anything of the condescension towards rustics which is found in a number of French pastourelles. Henryson develops his characters in his own way: Robene is more than a standard comic shepherd, and Makene's reactions are not quite as straightforward as those of the bergère (as Faral says ‘le trait que les poètes ont accoutumé de mettre en relief chez elles, c'est leur ingénue complaisance, la libre simplicité avec laquelle elles déclarent la satisfaction de leurs sens’).⁴³ However, a débat, often an extended argument, plays an important rôle in the pastourelle, as it does in Robene and Makene, and the central theme is certainly love. In one group, the poet-chevalier remains simply an onlooker, who sees Guiot and Robin disputing over the love of Marion, Robin resisting the advances of another girl and remaining faithful to Marion, Marote reproaching Robin for loving other shepherdesses, or similar scenes of rustic love. Henryson completely suppresses any notion of an onlooker, and develops the narrative and dramatic⁴⁴ aspects of the story, with the result that his poem comes to sound as much like one of Bartsch's Romanzen—brief lyrical narratives of love—as a pastourelle. It has been pointed out that the opening (far from the ‘riding out’ formula of the pastourelle) is similar to that of the ballad Lord Thomas and Fair Annet:

Lord Thomas and Fair Annet
Sate a' day on a hill

—or to that of the narrative carol ‘Joly Wat’.⁴⁵Robene and Makene, however, although it is a narrative poem concerned with love, does not fit quite happily into the category of ‘romance’ (in Bartsch's sense) or of ‘ballad’.⁴⁶ Henryson enjoys—as always—his dramatic scenes from rural life, and evokes something like the idyllic background of the peasant feasts mentioned in The Complaynt of Scotlande, ‘when evyrie ald scheiphyrd led his wyfe be the hand, and evyrie yong scheiphird led hyr quhome he luffit best’.⁴⁷ The result of the complete absence of any condescension towards his rustic wooers, and the genuine simplicity of his treatment of the story is to create a true pastoral. As Professor Kermode (quoting Empson) says: ‘The pastoral is a leveller—it has to assume that “you can say everything about complex people by a complete consideration of simple people”’.⁴⁸

That the harmony of any rural Arcadia is not proof against the power of love becomes apparent in the first stanza of the poem. The scene is briefly set—not with the traditional meadow, boschel or abespin of the pastourelle:

Robene sat on gud grene hill,
Kepand a flok of fe:
Mirry Makyne said him till …

—and we find ourselves into the action. Henryson has already in these three lines introduced the three main characters. Robene sits keeping his sheep, as medieval shepherds are often depicted. But it is also an appropriate posture for a man who is to prove a slow and recalcitrant lover. ‘Mirry’ Makene, who characteristically begins the action, is full of life and dynamism, and distinctly flightly as well. We are presented with the first of the many comic oppositions on which the poem is built. The third point of the ‘triangle’ so often found in a pastourelle is here no wandering knight-seducer, but a flock of sheep. The action proceeds—almost entirely in dramatic dialogue. Makene—not a remote and ‘daungerous’ lady of romance—opens with a direct plea:

‘Robene, thow rew one me;
I haif the luvit lowd and still,
Thir yeiris two or thre;
My dule in dern bot gif thow dill,
Dowtles but dreid I de.’

Robene pleads ignorance (an unsatisfactory excuse, as readers versed in the ‘law’ of love would know):

Robene ansert, ‘be the rude,
Nathing of lufe I knaw,
Bot keipis my scheip undir yone wid,
Lo quhair thay raik on raw;
Quhat hes marrit the in thy mude,
Makyne, to me thow schaw;
Or quhat is lufe, or to be lude?
Fane wald I leir that law.’

By the end of this little speech, we can recognize the beginnings of one of those patterns of Henrysonian irony which we saw in the Fables. Robene's words, however, also reveal his personality—his innocence, his slowness, his devotion to his sheep (comic in its intensity and pride—‘Lo quhair thay raik on raw’), and his totally unconscious cruelty. Makene attempts to give him a lesson in ‘lufis lair’. There is a hint of parody of ‘fin’ amors' when she spells out her ‘abc’ to one who seems most unlikely ever to become a long-suffering servant in the cause of noble love, but the scene is too delicate and touching to be simply a parody:

Be heynd, courtass, and fair of feir,
Wyse, hardy, and fre
… Preiss the with pane at all poweir,
Be patient and previe.

With nice irony, Robene, in the grip of invincible ignorance, is made to quote a well-known and very appropriate ‘sentence’:⁴⁹

I wait not quhat is luve;
Bot I haif mervell incertane
Quhat makis the this wanrufe …

and he goes on uncomprehendingly—he is not one who readily makes connections—to wonder why she is restless in such idyllic circumstances:

The weddir is fair, and I am fane,
My scheip gois haill aboif.

For all his innocence, he seems to know enough of the facts of life to use a phrase like ‘play us’, but what hinders him is the thought, not of jangling tongues or losengiers, but of the disapproval of his sheep:

And we wald play us in this plane,
They wald us bayth reproif.

Makene's pleas become urgent and quite open (ll. 33ff.), but once again, Robene's sheep are uppermost in his mind. And in a manner which is quite foreign to the absolute passion of Makene, he thinks of time:

Makyne, to morne this ilk a tyde,
And ye will meit me heir,
Peraventure my scheip ma gang besyd,
Quhill we haif liggit full neir.

He vainly tries to persuade Makene to return to the simple happiness which the mysterious power of love has taken from her, but it comes out as an abrupt and cruel attempt at consolation: ‘Makyn, than mak gud cheir.’

The climax of the scene comes in two stanzas of wonderfully dense dialogue, from which the opposing personalities emerge in a way which is at once pathetic and ironic:

‘Robene, thow reivis me roif and rest;
I luve bot the allone.’
‘Makyne, adew, the sone gois west,
The day is neir hand gone.’
‘Robene, in dule I am so drest,
That lufe wilbe my bone.’
‘Ga lufe, Makyne, quhair euir thow list,
For lemman I bid none.’
‘Robene, I stand in sic a styll;
I sicht, and that full sair.’
‘Makyne, I haif bene heir this quhyle;
At hame God gif I wair.’
‘My huny Robene, talk ane quhill,
Gif thow will do na mair.’
‘Makyne, sum uthir man begyle,
For hamewart I will fair.’

The end of the scene is marked by movement. They separate, and in another contrasting opposition, go their ways. Robene is ‘als licht as leif of tre’, a simile which not only compares him to a natural object, but to an unfeeling natural object, and which might well suggest to the skilled Henrysonian reader the possibility of change, of an ironic kind. Makene ‘murnit in hir intent’, and exclaims in her distress:

‘Now ma thow sing, for I am schent!
Quhat alis lufe at me?’

In a narrative bridge-passage, we are shown—without a word of analysis—the mysterious ways of love. One might well recall those lines in Troilus where Chaucer ponders why this fish and not that comes to the weir. Makene goes home in distress, and Robene, after he has performed his duty and ‘assemblit all his scheip’, begins to be affected—

Be that sum pairte of Mawkynis aill
Outthrow his hairt cowd creip

—and his reactions are predictable:

He fallowit hir fast thair till assaill,
And till hir tuke gude keip.

The rôles are now comically reversed—one cured, the other fallen ill—and Robene becomes the passionate suppliant:

‘Abyd, abyd, thow fair Makyne,
A word for ony thing;
For all my luve it salbe thyne,
Withowttin depairting …

though his passion still acknowledges the temporal limits imposed by his sheep:

My scheip to morne quhill houris nyne
Will neid of no keping.

He deserves the rebuke which is deftly loosed at him, and the proverbial lesson on the nature of opportunity:

Robene, thow hes hard soung and say,
In gestis and storeis auld,
The man that will nocht quhen he may
Sall haif nocht quhen he wald.

‘Nosce tempus’, as Taverner's version of Erasmus has it, ‘know time. Opportunitie is of such force that of honest it maketh unhonest, of dammage avauntage, of pleasure grevaunce, of a good turne a shrewd turne, and contraryewyse of unhonest honest, of avauntage dammage, and brefly to conclude it cleane chaungeth the nature of thynges.’⁵⁰ Besides instruction in the mysteries of time, the unfortunate Robene has been taught something of ‘love's law’. He continues to plead earnestly—by now he seems to have forgotten the sheep—and eloquently:

‘Makyne, the nicht is soft and dry,
The wedder is warme and fair,
And the grene woid rycht neir us by
To walk attour all quhair …’

but his case is doomed—

‘Robene, that warld is all away
And quyt brocht till ane end,
And nevir agane thairto perfay
Sall it be as thow wend,
For of my pane thow maid it play …

—and, beneath the ‘two smiles’ of the moralist, we see him receive the final blow:

‘Robene, with the I will nocht deill;
Adew, for thus we mett.’

In the last stanza the reversal is complete, and we take leave of the three protagonists, now placed back in their setting—Robene is no longer ‘on gud grene hill’ but ‘under a huche’ ‘amangis the holtis hair’ (Henryson contrives to make this formula of popular poetry marvellously evocative in the changed circumstances). It is a final ‘speaking picture’ of the mysterious and unresolved paradoxes of love:

Malkyne went hame blyth annewche
Attour the holttis hair;
Robene murnit, and Malkyne lewche;
Scho sang, he sichit sair;
And so left him, bayth wo and wrewche,
In dolour and in cair,
Kepand his hird under a huche,
Amangis the holtis hair.

The shorter poems are a final testimony to the variety of Henryson's achievement, to that ‘mark of a generous mind … its power both to rise to great things and to stoop to small ones’,⁵¹ to the assurance with which he transforms traditional matter and genre. From the whole of his work, and especially from his major poems, the Fables and the Testament of Cresseid, there emerges something even more impressive, a poetic personality of considerable complexity and originality. ‘Seriousness, humanity and strength’ co-exist with irony and wit. Henryson has a profoundly religious vision of man and the world, but it is not one in which a rigid moralist is always in control, rather one which holds—sometimes with difficulty—opposites in tension, and contrives, in an uneasy time, to achieve something like ‘completeness and harmony’. As Sir Francis Kynaston says, ‘this Mr. Robert Henderson he was questionles a learned and a witty man, and it is pitty we have no more of his works’.

Notes

1. See the full study by I. W. A. Jamieson, ‘The Minor Poems of Robert Henryson’, SSL ix (1971-2).

2. Cf. Jamieson, ‘Minor Poems’, p. 126n. The poem will not appear as Henryson's in Professor Fox's forthcoming edition. (Professor Fox also cautions us against accepting the attribution of all the remaining shorter poems as certain.)

3. Cf., e.g., Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. R. H. Robbins (New York, 1959), Nos. 54 et seq. (and notes).

4. Ed. W. Goodall (Edinburgh, 1759), II, p. 474.

5. Cf. Curtius, pp. 94-8. In its comic manifestations a favourite subject of the artists (the hunter hunted, etc.); often adapted by satirists (cf., for instance, Skelton's ‘The Manner of the World Nowadays’).

6. Whiting, D 150.

7. Cf. Jamieson, pp. 136-9; Gregory Smith, I, p. lxii, notes similarities with Lydgate's Fall of Princes, I, 4243ff. and (possibly) with The Churl and the Bird.

8. Cf. Jamieson, pp. 139-41. Denton Fox, in an important article, ‘Henryson's “Sum Practysis of Medecyne”’, SP lxix (1972), 453-60, draws attention to the French herberies, parodies of the selling speeches of quacks (e.g. Rutebeuf's Dit de l'Herberie), and suggests that the sixteenth-century parallels to Henryson's poem may well indicate the existence of an earlier ‘specifically Scottish tradition of humorous medical poems’.

9. G. Henslow, Medical Works of the Fourteenth Century (London, 1899), pp. 107, 70, 94, 20.

10. R. H. Robbins, Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (Oxford, 1952), p. 102.

11. T. Wright and J. O. Halliwell, Reliquiae Antiquae (London, 1841), I, pp. 250-1. Cf. in later mumming plays, the doctor's fantastic speech in R. J. E. Tiddy, The Mummers' Play (Oxford, 1923), p. 171. Cf. also A. Brody, The English Mummers and their Plays (London, 1971), p. 57.

12. The following examples are taken from Molière, Le Médecin volant, sc. ii, Piers Plowman, ed. Skeat, B vi, 275, Heywood, The Foure PP. (J. Q. Adams, Chief Shakespearean Dramas (Cambridge, Mass., 1924)), 374-5, Molière, Le Malade Imaginaire, I, v, Poggio in Lenaghan, Caxton's Aesop, p. 227, Le Malade Imaginaire, Intermède at end of Act III.

13. The Foure PP., ll. 616ff.

14. Brant, Narrenschiff, section 55; for Bosch, cf. M. Whinney, Early Flemish Painting (London, 1968), p. 101, pl. 65 (cf. also p. 102).

15. Jamieson, p. 141.

16. Cf. R. Garapon, La Fantaisie verbale dans le Théâtre français du Moyen Âge à la fin du 17^e Siècle (Paris, 1957).

17. Ed. P. G. Ricci (Rome, 1950).

18. Poetical Works, ed. Dyce (London, 1843), I, p. 119.

19. Cf. S. Rossi, ‘L' “Annunciazione” di Robert Henryson’, Aevum xxix (1955), 70-78, J. Stephens, ‘Devotion and Wit in Henryson's “The Annunciation”’, English Studies li (1970), 323-31, Charles A. Hallett, ‘Theme and Structure in Henryson's “The Annunciation”’, SSL x (1973), 165-74. On the Middle English lyrics, cf. Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1968), esp. pp. 141-3, Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (London, 1972), chapter 6. On the treatment of the theme in art, cf. the discussion in M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford, 1972), pp. 46ff.

20. Cf. Whiting, L 523.

21. ‘Love's river’ (cf. the four rivers which flow from Paradise (Gen. ii), and the theme of Fons Vitae (NQ ccviii (1963), 132)) suggests the idea of an overwhelming excess of love, which in religious and mystical contexts is regarded as most laudable (cf. L. Spitzer, World Harmony, pp. 95ff.). Cf. also R. L. Greene, The Early English Carols (2nd ed., Oxford, 1977), No. 123, ‘… Ther sprong a well at Maris fote / That torned all this world to bote …’.

22. Mimesis (tr. W. Trask, Princeton, 1953), p. 74.

23. Carleton Brown, Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century (Oxford, 1939), No. 147. On old age, cf. G. R. Coffman, ‘Old Age from Horace to Chaucer’, Speculum ix (1934), 249-77, K. McKenzie, ‘Antonio Pucci on Old Age’, ib. xv (1940), 180-5, Gray, Themes and Images, pp. 173-5. See Jamieson, pp. 127-31. Cf. the description of Age in The Parlement of the Thre Ages ed. M. Y. Offord, EETS ccxlvi (1959), ll. 152-60.

24. I follow Fox in adopting the Maitland Folio reading mynnis.

25. Cf. Kennedy's ‘Honour with Age’, The Maitland Folio MS. ed. W. A. Craigie, STS N.S. vii (1919), I, pp. 234-5, Gray, A Selection of Religious Lyrics (Oxford, 1975), Nos. 91, 92 and notes.

26. Cf. Jamieson, pp. 132-3. Gregory Smith, I, pp. lxviii-lxix, drew attention to close similarities with a poem in the Vernon MS. (‘Bi a wey wandryng’, Minor Poems of the Vernon Manuscript, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS cxvii (1901), II, pp. 688-9).

27. Cf. Gray, Themes and Images, pp. 181-2, 285-6, Selection, No. 65 and note. For Dürer's drawing, see E. Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, 1955), p. 106, fig. 147. The plague saints were known in Scotland: St. Roch on an arch at Rosslyn shows the plague spot on his leg; St. Sebastian had a chapel at Easter Portsburgh. Foullis wrote a poem, Calamitose pestis Elega deploratio, on an outbreak of plague in Edinburgh at the end of the fifteenth century, sent, he says, by God as a punishment because of a fire in St. Giles (Humanistica Lovaniensia xxiv (1975), 108-22). On the plague in Scotland, see J. D. Comrie, History of Scottish Medicine (London, 1932), pp. 202-21. There seems to be nothing in Henryson's poem which links it with any one of the several outbreaks in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries. Cf. Jamieson, pp. 141-3.

28. The Historie and Cronicles of Scotland, ed. Æ. J. G. Mackay, STS xlii (1899), p. 30. Cf. Holcot's story of a plague of flies in Norfolk with ira dei written on their wings (B. Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1960), p. 161).

29. Tr. M. Heseltine (Loeb Classical Library), p. 53. Cf. Herodotus II, 78. On devotional lyrics on death, see Woolf, English Religious Lyric, chapters III, IX, and Appendix H, Gray, Themes and Images, chapter 10. Cf. Jamieson, pp. 131-2.

30. Scotichronicon, ed. W. Goodall (Edinburgh, 1759), II, pp. 374-5.

31. With Fox, in l. 20 I prefer MF laithly.

32. Testament, 325-8, Œuvres, ed. A. Longnon, rev. L. Foulet (Paris, 1932), p. 22.

33. Testament, ll. 1744-51, ed. cit., p. 68.

34. Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, p. 23, fig. 27 (for a comparable English example, cf. the Cotton Faustina ‘Vado Mori’ (Gray, Themes and Images, pl. 11)).

35. Cf. Jamieson, pp. 135-6.

36. Caxton, ed. A. T. P. Byles, EETS clxviii (1926), pp. 76-89; The Pilgrimage of the Lyf of the Manhode, ed. W. A. Wright (Roxburghe Club, 1869), pp. 58ff. Cf. also P. Meyer, Romania xx (1891), 579-615, The Lantern of Light, ed. L. M. Swinburn, EETS cli (1917), pp. 65-6.

37. Cf., e.g., Robbins, Historical Poems, No. 53 and note, F. W. Fairholt, Satirical Songs and Poems on Costume from the 13th to the 19th Century (Percy Soc., xxvii, 1849).

38. Cf. G. F. Jones, ‘Sartorial Symbols in Mediaeval Literature’, MÆ xxv (1956), 69-70.

39. It has some similarities with the version in the Gesta Romanorum. Jamieson, pp. 143-5, draws attention to versions in Bozon and a Middle English sermon. On the theme of Christ the Lover-Knight, see Woolf, English Religious Lyric, pp. 44-6, and RES, N.S. xiii (1962), 1-16. It is a curious fact, probably unconnected with Henryson's poem, that the insurgents of 1489 against James IV adopted as their banner the ‘bludy serk’ of his dead father (R. Nicholson, Scotland. The Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1974), p. 537).

40. E.g. (l. 6) ‘sexty yeiris’; cf. Sir Orfeo, l. 90, S. I. Tucker, ‘Sixty as an Indefinite Number in Middle English’, RES xxv (1949), 152-3.

41. Cf. the story of how Christ's coat of mercy protects Pilate (Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, D 1381.4.1, J. Pauli, Schimpf und Ernst (1522), ed. J. Bolte, Berlin, 1924, No. 323)—Tiberius wishés to kill Pilate, but when Pilate is in his presence his anger vanishes, because Pilate is wearing Christ's garment.

42. Cf. Jamieson, pp. 145-6, W. P. Jones, MLN xlvi (1931), 457-8, A. K. Moore, ‘Robene and Makene’, MLR xliii (1948), 400-3, and The Secular Lyric in Middle English (Lexington, 1951), pp. 188-94. For Baudes de la Kakerie, see K. Bartsch, Altfranzösische Romanzen und Pastourellen (Leipzig, 1870), pp. 302-5. On the pastourelle, see, e.g., E. Faral, ‘La Pastourelle’, Romania xlix (1923), 204-50, C. Foulon, L'œuvre de Jehan Bodel (Paris, 1958), P. Dronke, The Medieval Lyric (London, 1968), esp. pp. 200ff. Cf. H. Cooper, Pastoral (D. S. Brewer, 1977).

43. Faral, p. 229.

44. Cf. C. R. Baskervill, ‘Early Romantic Plays in England’, MP xiv, who notes (pp. 238-9) a payment at York in 1447 to ‘ii ludentibus Joly Wat and Malkyn’ which suggests a ‘simple song drama of the pastourelle type’.

45. Moore, MLR xliii, p. 402. Lord Thomas, F. J. Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, No. 73A; ‘Joly Wat’, R. L. Greene, The Early English Carols, No. 78.

46. Some European ballads (cf. W. J. Entwhistle, European Balladry (Oxford, 1939), p. 178) have a gentle lady making overtures to an unresponsive shepherd (cf. e.g. ‘Romance de una gentil dama, y un rústico pastor’, F. J. Wolf and C. Hofmann, Primavera y flor de Romances (Berlin, 1856), II, pp. 64-5). The French ‘Occasion Manquée’, mentioned by Entwhistle, sounds as if it might be more comparable, but he gives no reference for it.

47. Ed. J. A. H. Murray, EETS ES xvii (1872), p. 65.

48. J. F. Kermode, English Pastoral Poetry (London, 1952), p. 26; W. Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London, 1935), p. 137.

49. Cf. the stanzas in Grimestone's Preaching Book, ‘I ne wot quat is love … Owst, Literature and Pulpit, p. 21, E. Wilson, A Descriptive Index of the English Lyrics in John of Grimestone's Preaching Book (Medium Ævum Monographs, N.S. ii, Oxford, 1973), No. 23.

50. Proverbes or Adagies (London, 1545), f. xxiv^v. The proverb is common, cf. Whiting, W 275 (and variants), S. B. Meech, MP xxxviii (1940-1), 117, W. A. Pantin, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library xiv (1930), 108.

51. Perrault, Contes de ma Mère Loye, tr. G. Brereton (London, 1957), p. 3.

Abbreviations

EETS Early English Text Society (ES: Extra Series)

MÆ Medium Ævum

MLN Modern Language Notes

MLR Modern Language Review

MP Modern Philology

NQ Notes and Queries

RES Review of English Studies

SP Studies in Philology

SSL Studies in Scottish Literature

STS Scottish Text Society

Whiting B. J. Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly before 1500 (Cambridge, Mass., London, 1968)