Erthe Upon Erthe Part 5

Other inscriptions are as follows:--

On an old bra.s.s, quoted by W. Williams, _Notes and Queries_, I. vii.

577, and thought by him to belong to the Church of St. Helen's, London[25]:--

'Here lyeth y^e bodyes of James Pomley, y^e sonne of ould Dominick Pomley and Jane his wyfe: y^e said James deceased y^e 7th day of Januarie Anno Domini 1592 he beyng of y^e age of 88 years, & y^e sayd Jane deceased y^e -- day of -- D --

Earth goeth up Earth as moulde up moulde; Earth goeth up Earth all glittering as golde, As though earth to y^e earth never turne sholde; And yet shall earth to y^e earth sooner than he wolde.

On a tomb at Edmonton of unknown date (possibly sixteenth century), mentioned by Weever (_Ancient Funerall Monuments_) in 1631, and by Pettigrew (_Chronicles of the Tombs_, p. 67) in 1857:--

Erth goyth upon erth as mold upon mold, Erth goyth upon erth al glisteryng in gold, As though erth to erth ner turne shold, And yet must erth to erth soner than he wolde.

Formerly on a headstone in St. James's Churchyard, Clerkenwell, deciphered about 1812, but already lost in 1851, probably owing to the dismantling of the churchyard. (Cf. _Notes and Queries_, III. i. 389):--

Earth walks on Earth like glittering gold; Earth says to Earth 'We are but mold'.

Earth builds on Earth castles & towers; Earth says to Earth, 'All shall be ours!'

Formerly on a tombstone at St. Martin's, Ludgate, to Florens Caldwell esq. of London & Ann Mary Wilde, his wife (Pettigrew, p. 67)[26]:--

Earth goes to Earth, as mold to mold; Earth treads on Earth, glittering in gold: Earth as to Earth returne ne'er shoulde; Earth shall to Earth goe e'er he wolde.

Earth upon Earth consyder may; Earth goes to Earth naked away.

Earth though on Earth be stowt & gay Earth shall from Earth pa.s.se poore away.

Be mercifull & charitable, Relieve the poor as thou art able.

A shrowd to the grave Is all thou shalt have.

This interesting monument has unfortunately disappeared. Doubtless there are many other traces of the poem to be found, but it appears to have been rarely used on tombstones after 1700,[27] and earlier monuments, unless specially preserved, are rarely decipherable at the present day.

LITERARY INTEREST.

_Erthe upon Erthe_ cannot be said to possess great literary value in itself. The interest of the poem lies chiefly in its evident popularity, and in the insight it gives into the kind of literature which became popular in the Middle Ages. It belongs essentially to the same cla.s.s as the _Soul and Body_ Poems, and the _Dance of Death_. In the early days of its introduction into Western Europe, Christianity made great use in its appeal to the ma.s.s of the people of the fear of death and dread of the Judgement. The early monastic writers dwelt upon the idea of man's mortality and decay, and the transitoriness of human rank and pleasure.

Hence the frequency with which such themes as the _Dance of Death_ were treated in literature and in art. Closely allied with this idea of the fleeting nature of earthly things, and to some extent a result of it, was the conception of the separation of man's bodily from his spiritual self which pervades all mediaeval post-Christian literature. In Old English times already, this sense of a sharp division between the two is embodied in No. xliv of the O.E. _Riddles_:--

[28]Ic wat indryhtne aeelum deorne ?iest in ?eardum, aem se grimma ne maeg hunger scean ne se hata urst, yldo ne adle [ne se enga dea], ?if him arlice esne ena, se e agan sceal [his ?eongorscipe]

on am sifaete: hy gesunde aet ham finda witode him wiste ? blisse, cnosles unrim, care, ?if se esne his blaforde hyre yfle frean on fore, ne wile forht wesan broer orum: him aet bam scee, onne hy from bearme begen hweorfa anre magan ellorfuse moddor ? sweostor.

This sets forth the same conception of the duality in man as is represented in the O.E. _Speech of the Soul to the Body_, and in the whole group of _Soul and Body_ poems, and the idea recurs constantly in other monastic texts, cf. Morris, _O. E. Miscellany_, iii (_Sinners Beware_), p. 83:--

326. e feondes heom for lede Boe lychom and saule.

331-336. e saule sey to e lychome, Accursed wure i nome, in heaued and in heorte.

u vs hauest iwroht es schome, And alle ene eche grome Vs schall euer smerte.

_MS. Harl._ 2253, fol. 106, v^o, l. 7: e fleysh stont a?eyn e gost.

These two fundamental ideas of the transitoriness and hence worthlessness of man's earthly part, and the cleavage between it and his spiritual part, lie at the root of much of the mediaeval literature, and represent the two not incompatible extremes to which the monastic ideal of life, from its very one-sidedness, was capable of leading: on the one hand a certain morbid materialism, on the other an ascetic mysticism.

Nor can it be denied that the mediaeval mind took a certain grim pleasure in dwelling upon the more grotesque aspect of these things. The O.E. poet found the same enjoyment in describing his '?ifer'--

[29]se wyrm, e a ?ea?las beo naedle scearpran: se genyde to aerest eallra on am eorsciaefe,

as the painters of the _Dance of Death_ in the drawing of their skeletons and emblems of mortality, or the Gothic carver in his gargoyles. Perhaps, too, some satisfaction in dwelling upon the hollowness of earthly joys, and the bitter fate of those who took their fill of them, was not lacking to a few of those who had turned their backs upon them.

_Erthe upon Erthe_ is perhaps more especially concerned with the first of the two conceptions mentioned above, man's mortality, but, as has already been shown, a close connexion exists between it and the _Soul and Body_ poems, and though the idea of the duality in man is not mentioned, it is certainly present. The poem is more popular in form than either the _Dance of Death_ or the various _Soul and Body_ Dialogues, perhaps because of its purely English origin, and seems to represent a later and more popular product of the ideas which gave rise to the other two groups. Its short mono-rimed stanza, its jingling internal rime, and its half-riddling, half-punning character, appear to have especially commended it to popular favour, and it is significant that it became most widely-known in its simpler forms.

EDITOR'S NOTE.

In preparing the text of this edition, all the available MSS. have been consulted, the only two not examined being William Billyng's MS. and the Brighton MS., which were formerly in the possession of private owners, and have eluded all search for them. As exhaustive a search as was possible has been made for other texts of the poem, but it has often escaped cataloguing, and it is probable that other copies of the B version, at least, exist.

The punctuation, inverted commas, and regular use of initial capitals in the text are the Editor's. The MSS. vary in their use of capitals, the same MS. being often inconsistent with itself, while the Cambridge text frequently employs them for unimportant words in the middle of the line, as p. 33, l. 45, Ar, &c. Capitals have been added in the case of all proper names. Letters and words which are obscure or illegible in the MS., or which appear to have been accidentally omitted, are enclosed in square brackets, and a hyphen has been inserted where the MS. separates a prefix or particle from the rest of the word. The MS. writings ff, , ?, v for u and vice versa, have been retained in the text, and ??, th, expanded to ll{e}, th{e}, but it was not thought advisable to expand m~, n~, to m{e}, n{e}, nor other letters such as d, r, g, when written with a final flourish. Fifteenth-century scribes appear to have used such flourishes at the end of the word rather as a matter of habit than with any particular meaning, and the forms to which expansion of them would lead, such as _one_, _onne_ for _on_, are frequently most improbable. It was therefore thought better to ignore such flourishes, or to indicate the persistent use of them by a footnote.

[Transcriber's Note: The mid-paragraph characters are "ll" and "th", each with a single stroke through both letters.]

As the conclusions arrived at in the Introduction with regard to the relations.h.i.+p of the English and Latin versions in MS. Harl. 913, and the verbal connexion with the _Soul and Body_ Dialogues, agree, to some extent, with those indicated by Heuser, _Die Kildare-Gedichte_, pp.

176-80, it is only reasonable to state that the greater part of the work upon the subject had been done, and a projected article upon it written in reply to Professor Fiedler's in the _Modern Language Review_, before I had any knowledge of Heuser's text, and that my conclusions had been formed independently of his, though his have helped to strengthen and confirm them. Moreover I owe his work a very real debt, since I first learned from it of the existence of the Cambridge Text, which has been a most important link in the building up of the general theory as to the connexion between the different versions of the poem.

In conclusion, it is a pleasure to express thanks for kind and courteous a.s.sistance to the authorities of the British Museum, the Public Record Office, the Bodleian, Cambridge University Library and Lincoln Cathedral Library; to the librarian of Lambeth Palace Library, to whom I am indebted for the collation of the Lambeth text; to the authorities of Magdalene College, Cambridge, for permission to copy and print the Maitland text; to Lord Harlech for the loan of the Porkington MS.; to Professor Fiedler for permission to use the Brighton text; to Professor Priebsch, who pointed out the text in MS. Harl. 4486; to Miss Helen Sandison, of Bryn Mawr College, U.S.A., for the discovery of the text in the Appendix and for two of the a.n.a.logues, and to Professor Skeat for valuable advice and suggestions. In particular this text owes much to my Father, Sir James Murray of the _Oxford Dictionary_, who has read the proofs, and in the midst of his own arduous work has always been ready with help and advice, to my friend Miss K. S. Block, Lecturer in English at the Royal Holloway College, and, above all, to Dr. Furnivall, in whom all scholars and students of English mourn to-day the loss of a great pioneer, and an ever-ready friend and adviser.

OXFORD, _July_ 1910.

Since this was sent to press two other copies of the B version have come to light at Cambridge, and have by kind permission been inserted on pp.

47, 48 as Appendix II:--

(B 19) MS. Trinity College R. 3. 21, fol. 33, v^o, a copy of the normal B version in seven stanzas.

(B 20) MS. Trinity College B. 15. 39, fol. 170, which contains nine stanzas of the expanded text preserved in MSS. Lambeth and Laud, and appears to represent a distinct copy of the original of these two (see Introd. p. xix).

[Footnote 1: A second Latin version of an _Erthe_ poem, together with the same poem in Anglo-French, and in Middle English, occurs on the back of a Roll in the Public Record Office, dating from the time of Edward II (Ex^r. K. R. Proceedings, Bdle. 1; old No.

845/21), and in a 19th cent. transcript of this in MS. Brit. Mus.

Addit. 25478; it is given in the Appendix. Both the Latin and the French appear to be translations or paraphrases of the English, with an additional verse or two.]

[Footnote 2: The English text in the Appendix consists of nine four-lined stanzas, and is distinct from either of the two current versions of the poem. It appears to have been suggested by the opening lines of A, and may be regarded as a single sub-type of A, not affecting the main line of argument of the Introduction. (See Appendix, p. 46.)]

[Footnote 3: This is repeated on each page of Bateman's text, and is, perhaps, his own design.]

[Footnote 4: See Bateman's Preface.]

[Footnote 5: Probably not the author but the copier of the MS.: see Notes.]

[Footnote 6: All the stanzas of the B version are four-lined except MS. Porkington.]

[Footnote 7: v. Wanley's Catalogue.]

[Footnote 8: My attention was called to this MS. by the kindness of Prof. Priebech.]

[Footnote 9: MS. Laud Misc. is not written throughout in metrical lines, but the divisions of the stanzas, and, in most cases, of the lines, are clearly indicated.]