and the The oldest English poem in short rhyming lines is a Paraphrase of the Pater Noster, made in the twelfth century, which also shows the Teutonic habit of reliance upon regularity of accent rather than on strict agreement in the number of the syllables. In another poem of the middle of the thirteenth century, "The Owland the Nightingale," The Owl the syllables have their full value-none being Nightingale. slipped over. This lively southern English poem tells how the owl and the nightingale advanced each against the other his own several claims to admiration, and set forth the demerits of his antagonist; and how they agreed that Nicholas of Guildford should be judge between them. Master Nicholas-if he be the author-lets us know that from a gay youth in the world he had passed into the Church, where his merits had been neglected, and that he was living at Portisham, in Dorsetshire. Portisham lies about seven miles westward of Dorchester. In this poem we have good wit, homely proverb, with direct reference to King Alfred, and a style so English that its 1,792 lines contain only about twenty words of old French origin; yet there is evidence of taste and culture in the accuracy with which its author uses the rhyming eight-syllabled measure. There is reference in this poem to a King Henry who punished the snaring of nightingales. Joseph Stevenson, who first printed the piece in 1838, believed that this king was Henry II. quent use of proverbs he associated with the currency of a Collection of Proverbs, ascribed to King Alfred, who sat at Seaford surrounded by many The fre Proverbs of Alfred. * See upon these questions Dr. J. Schipper's "Alt englische Metrik" (Bonn, 1881), pp. 270-282. "The Owl and the Nightingale, a Poem of the Twelfth Century. Now first printed from Manuscripts in the Cottonian Library and at Jesus College, Oxford; with an Introduction and Glossary. Edited by Joseph Stevenson" (Roxburghe Club, 1838). The poem was edited again by Thomas Wright for the Percy Society in 1843. These Proverbs were printed both by Thomas Wright in his thanes, bishops, and book-learned men, earls and knights -Earl Ælfric being there with Alfred, England's Darling. Then Alfred began to teach— "He wes King and he wes Clerk, And war on his werke. He was be wisiste mon That was Engle londe on.” But the pieces in that MS. at Jesus College which contains "The Owl and the Nightingale” and also the Proverbs of Alfred, include, as Dr. Richard Morris has pointed out,* a reference to Papal exactions on the clergy, through which "holy Church is under foot;" and these must have been the exactions of Pope Innocent IV., against which there were remonstrances from the King and Parliament of England from the year 1244 to the year 1247. It is to be observed, again, that in the Cotton. MS. which contains "The Owl and the Nightingale "-the same MS. which contains also the earlier of the two copies of LayamonNicholas of Guildford's poem is in the same, or a contemporary, handwriting with another piece that gives a brief Chronicle ending with the reign of Henry III. "Reliquiæ Antiquæ," and by J. M. Kemble in his edition of the "Dialogues of Solomon and Saturnus " for the Ælfric Society, from a MS. which has since been lost from the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. It has been printed also from the MS. at Jesus College, Oxford, which includes one of the two copies of "The Owl and the Nightingale" that have come down to us, the other being in the Cotton. Collection, Caligula A ix. *In the introduction to "An Old English Miscellany, Containing a Bestiary, Kentish Sermons, Proverbs of Alfred, Religious Poems of the Thirteenth Century from Manuscripts in the British Museum, Bodleian Library, Jesus College Library, &c. Edited, with Introduction and Index of Words, by the Rev. Richard Morris, LL.D." (Early English Text Society, 1872). It is quite possible to suppose, and is therefore supposed by some, that the writer of "The Owl and the Nightingale" does not mean himself when he makes the birds leave their dispute to the arbitration of Nicholas at Portisham. In that case he is to be regarded, not as a playful poet glancing at himself when he makes the birds tell of the wisdom of Nicholas, who has had small reward for his services, but as putting in a good word for a friend. A Bestiary in one of the Arundel MSS. of the British Museum* was copied by Thomas Wright, and was ascribed by him to the earlier half of the thirteenth cen- A Bestiary. He found its source in the Physiologus† tury. of Theobaldus or Thetbaldus, printed at the end of Beaugendre's edition of the works of Hildebert, Archbishop of Tours, as Hildebert's. Lessing, however, pointed to earlier impressions, and to the closing lines— "Carmine finito, sit laus et gloria Cristo, Cui, si non alii, placeant hæc Metra Tibaldi." A Bishop Tibaldus or Theobaldus is sometimes referred to in medieval manuscripts as author of a Physiologus. The English Bestiary takes the same twelve creatures that are given in the Latin "Metra Tibaldi," and it takes them in the same order, except transposition of the wolf and stag. These are—the lion, eagle, serpent, ant, stag, wolf, spider, whale, siren, elephant, turtle-dove, and panther. There is an addition of only one other creature, in eighteen lines upon the Nature of the culver and its signification. The eighteen lines upon this pigeon are four for introduction and two for each of her seven qualities ; one of the two is to name the quality, and one is to apply its moral. Thus: She has no gall-we * Arundel MS. No. 292, fol. 4. First printed by Thomas Wright in the second volume of the "Altdeutsche Blätter," and then in the first volume of Wright and Halliwell's "Reliquiæ Antiquæ." +"E.W." II. 245. Paris, 1708. also should be simple and soft; she does not live on preywe also should not rob; she leaves the worm, and lives upon the seed-we need the love of Christ; she is as a mother to other birds so should we be to each other; her song is like lament-let us lament, we have done wrong; she sees the hawk's coming mirrored in water—and we are warned in sacred books against the seizure by the devil; she makes her nest in a hole of the rock-and our best hope is in Christ's mercy. The name "Physiologus " was a familiar word for such collections of moralised natural history, and was used sometimes as if it were the name of their inventor. In a writing against Heresy, Epiphanius, a Jewish Christian bishop, who opposed Origen at the close of the fourth century, quoted and applied a nature of the serpent with a direct reference to books of this kind as his authority"s paoiv oi quoioλóyou." Fabulous qualities ascribed often to animals by the ancients were the first source of these allegories, to which a religious turn was given by the Greek Fathers of the Church. In time the properties of each animal, as they were adapted to their Christian interpretations, became as definitely settled as the canons of the Church itself. A Physiologus ascribed to Epiphanius was published by Ponce de Leon at Rome in 1587.* In the Western Church there is reference to a Latin Physiologus, ascribed to St. Ambrose, which was condemned as apocryphal and heretical by Pope Gelasius II. in a council of the year 496. There are several Latin manuscripts of such works, but none earlier than the eighth century. They are to be found also in old high German prose of the eleventh century, and in the old French of * Other versions of the fifteenth century are to be found in Pitra Spicilegium Solesmenæ (Paris), F. Didot. In this collection will be found an Armenian Physiologus translated from the Greek; and there is notice in the prolegomena, page xlvii., of an Æthiopian Fisalgos. A Syrian Physiologus was edited by Tychsen at Rostock in 1795. 66 Philippe de Thaun at the beginning of the twelfth century. Another is of the thirteenth century, "Le Bestiaire Divin " of Guillaume, Clerc de Normandie. Another is "Le Bes-. tiaire d'Amour" of Richard de Fournival. Traditions taken from the Bestiaries found their way also into the Speculum Naturale" of Vincent of Beauvais. Our Old English Bestiary contains few Norman words in its vocabulary; and Dr. Morris believes that it may have been written by the author of the poems of "Genesis" and "Exodus." * Debate of the Body and the Soul. There is also in Transition English a Debate of the Body and the Soul,† which shows the continuance of the form represented in First English by two similar poems in the Exeter Book. Thomas Wright found ten manuscripts of one Latin "Dialogus inter Corpus et Animam," a poem of 312 lines; and there is in mixed prose and verse a "Querimonia et Conflictus Carnis et Spiritus " included among the works of Hildebert. Such poems were still written in the fourteenth century. Our thirteenth-century Debate of the Body and the Soul collects octosyllabic rhyming lines into eight-lined stanzas by interlacement of two double pairs of rhymes, thus "Als I lay in a winteris nyt In a droupening befor the day, A Body on a beré lay, Losen he haved the livés lyht; The Gost was oute, and scholde away." 66 * The whole Bestiary is reprinted and carefully edited with notes and introduction by Eduard Mätzner in his Altenglische Sprachproben nebst einem Wörterbuche, unter Midwirkung von Karl Goldbeck " (Erster Band, Berlin, 1867). I am chiefly indebted to Mätzner for the information given in the text. In the Bodleian, MS. Laud 108, fol. 100. "E. W." II. 196, 202. |