1

This is the full text, completed in 1995, of a paper originally delivered to a Research

Seminar on Approaches to Late-Medieval Culture and Society at the Centre for Medieval

Studies, University of Copenhagen (arranged in association with the Pontifical Institute

of Medieval Studies, Toronto), in February, 1990. Re-uploaded to Academia.edu 6

August 2017 with purely technical adjustments.

MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE AND FOLK CUSTOM:

THE “ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH" RECONSIDERED

Thomas Pettitt

SUMMARY

Among the approaches to medieval English literature

competing for attention in the post war boom in Medieval

Studies was the so-called "anthropological" approach

largely associated with John Speirs, and which achieved

considerable influence through his contributions to the

Pelican Guide to English Literature. "Anthropological" in

the sense of relating medieval poetry to the rites and

mentalities of so-called “ primitive" cultures studied by

anthropologists, the approach foundered through its

adherence to a by then outmoded school of anthropology

(the evolutionary thesis bequeathed by Sir James Frazer

to Jessie Weston and Margaret Murray), and by an

extreme assertion that the literature was influenced by

rites still current among medieval communities. In drawing

attention to the association between medieval literature

and traditional customs (whatever their origins, and in the

far from primitive form they had in the Middle Ages),

Speirs may nonetheless have made a contribution of

lasting value to an historically informed and contextually

alert appreciation of medieval literature.

Many a medievalist drawn to the field in the immediately post-war decades must owe

his curiosity to the now largely defunct "anthropological approach" to whose

posthumous assessment this essay is devoted, and whose revival in a newer and more

virile form (appropriately, here in the shadow of The Golden Bough) is contemplated

as a possible option. Among many attractions the theory countered the guilty

awareness of medievalism’s escapist credentials with the possibility that much

medieval literature reflected, was inspired by, or even preserved something

significant by any standards, that is basic, primitive, religious beliefs, manifested in

2

rituals, which were designed to ensure the fertility of crops, herds and men, and

hence the survival of the community; rituals also surviving as the quaint but

somehow disquieting seasonal customs of more recent times to which the

"anthropological approach" makes frequent appeals in its documentation.

But most medievalists (and many folklorists) have since become persuaded that

most of the assumptions on which this approach was based are at best uncertain, and

most of its results therefore at best questionable. I suggest the "anthropological

approach" merits reassessment nonetheless as having taken us past some significant

landmarks in the history of medieval vernacular culture, even while it was pointing

our attention in the wrong direction.

ooo

The anthropological approach is primarily, almost exclusively associated with the

name of John Speirs, who first applied it in a series of articles published in Scrutiny

in the late 40’s and early 50’s, on the romance Sir Gawain and theGreen Knight, the

alliterative satire Winner and Waster, and the Mystery Cycles.1 Revised versions,

with additional material, were published in his book Medieval English Poetry: The

Non-Chaucerian Tradition,2 but Speirs’ impact was probably most intense and

widespread in the "Survey of Middle English Verse" prefacing Vol. I of the much-

read Pelican Guide to English Literature.3

From the last two of these I offer the following selection of instances to illustrate

Speirs' characteristic assumptions and methods:

Of the thirteenth-century French love-allegory, The Romance of the Rose

(translated by Chaucer in the fourteenth century):

A reading of the first part of the Chaucerian Romaunt of the Rose will

introduce the modern English reader ... to a poetry that was intimately

associated with the spring festivals when both peasant and courtly folk

danced and celebrated the annual triumph of summer over winter.

("Survey", p. 27)

Of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls:

(with relation to the talking birds):

...this species of tales may have originated in the impersonating of animals

and birds by humans dressed in skins or feathers in the dramatic rituals of

the ancient communities.

(and with relation to the flyting between the "gentils" and the "cherles" among

the birds):

it has been traced back to the flyting-match that was a regular

preliminary to, or substitute for, the combat between the two

antagonists -- Summer and Winter, the Old Year and the New, the Old

3

Divine King or God and the New -- in ancient dramatic rituals.

("Survey", pp. 28& 29)

Of William Langland's allegory of social ills, Piers Plowman:

The Seven Deadly Sins appear to have been creations of the folk

imagination (or re-creations of some older mythological or ritual figures) of

the folk imagination as it took possession of the vernacular preachers.

(“Survey", p. 35)

Of the metrical romances of chivalry:

... the gods of ancient mythology became, on the one hand, medieval

knights and, on the other, their monstrous or other-world antagonists; the

spring or earth goddesses became courtly ladies or queens or, retaining

their other-world character, fays

(and concerning the [allegedly frequent] combat between the hero and the

keeper of a castle):

The antagonists . . . were originally different phases of one and the same

god, perhaps the old and young sky-god, or the old and new year, winter

and summer. ... In the original ritual -- for a myth is the story of a ritual,

the story the ritual enacts -- the old divine king and the young king who

supplanted him evidently impersonated one and the same god. … After

the ritual combat follows the ritual marriage. The victor marries the goddess

or queen. This goddess, the spring or earth goddess, has become in the

medieval romances the faery lady or queen ("Survey", pp. 38 & 39.)

of the Middle English lyrics:

several … [secular songs] appear to belong with the rites and ceremonies

and sacred dances of the Old Nature religion, and may have been evolved

for special festival occasions, such as the May Day rites. .. Moreover the

Christian lyrics are just as much rooted in pre-Christian myth and ritual,

in the rites and ceremonies of the old Nature festivals ...

(for example):

...in several of the most beautiful of them, Mary has something of the

significance still of the tree goddess, the flower goddess, or the spring

goddess. ("Survey", p. 44)

and finally of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

The Green Knight whose head is chopped off at his own request and who

is yet as miraculously or magically alive as ever, bears an unmistakable

relation to the Green Man -- the Jack in the Green or the Wild Man of the

village festivals of England and Europe. ...

(and meanwhile)

The Green Man ...is surely a descendant of the Vegetation or Nature god

of almost universal and immemorial tradition ...whose death and

4

resurrection are the myth-and-ritual counterpart of the annual death

and rebirth of nature. (Medieval English Poetry, p. 219 ).

I have massed these instances in some quantity to indicate both the range of material

amenable to the anthropological approach (even when excluding the special case of

the drama) and the variety of the relationships suggested by Speirs between the

literary work on the one hand, and the primitive ceremony on the other.

There is firstly an indirect relationship, in which an original, presumably distant

and now defunct, ritual gives rise to an explanatory myth (which in some circles

would be called its "spoken correlative"); this, perhaps as belief declines, modulates

into tales, which in turn provide the sources for literary narratives, whose events and

figures nonetheless retain something of the original ritual aura. This Speirs shared

with many critics of a long-established myth-and-ritual school, and he himself

refers to the analogous views of Jessie Weston on the origins of the grail

romance.4 Of this relationship – the ultimate origins of this or that feature of a

literary work in a distant myth or ritual -- I shall have no more to say. It is probably

best left to the professional anthropologists, and for the purposes of historical

appreciation is relevant only if the ritual connotations are current in the minds of

author and/or readers, and this in turn must be verifiable by independent,

contemporaneously historical, documentation.

More important, and more characteristic of Speirs' approach, is the direct

relationship postulated between literature and a pre-Christian ritual which itself

persists into the later Middle Ages and beyond. Rather than to Jessie Weston on the

grail myth, the analogy here is rather to Margaret Murray's views on Elizabethan

witchcraft as a continuation of an ancient “Dianic” fertility cult, and to this work, too,

Speirs makes specific reference.5 Such persisting ritual, he asserts, was observed or

even participated in by the poets, who describe it in or otherwise incorporate it into,

their literary works -- some of which may even preserve directly the words of the

ritual.

This scenario is most clearly represented by Speirs' treatment of the mystery

cycles, which provides my concluding illustration of the approach, as well as the last

twist in its documentation, the circumstance that while we have no evidence of this

ritual from pre-historic times, and precious little from late-medieval times, its

existence is confirmed, and its nature revealed, by the remnants of it surviving into

our own times as traditional custom and folk drama.

Why is it, Speirs asks, that "there are things in the [mystery] plays of which the

Church became more than doubtful", such as “buffoonery and farce"?

The explanation almost certainly is that there always had been -- among the

Scandinavian, Teutonic, and Celtic peoples ... -- a ritual drama before

Christianity. Everywhere among the people in the Middle Ages there were

fragments of this older, pre-Christian ·dramatic ritual -- ceremonies, dances,

games -- still being practised . … Certain of these survived almost to our own

5

day among the folk, as the Mummers' Play, the Wooing Play, the Morris Dance,

and the Sword Dance. It is now generally agreed that these are not the

blundering efforts of the folk at spontaneous dramatic creation, but are the

degenerate and confused remnants of the dramatic ritual of an ancient Nature

religion that survived among the folk. [So] there was ... a great deal in the nature

of dramatic ritual outside the Church with which the new Christian drama

could become at least partially associated; and what we do find in the Mystery

Cycle itself is a profound union of the new and the old -- such as the priestly

class could not by itself have accomplished, even supposing it had wanted to.6

I suspect also that the vehemence of the response to Speirs' "anthropological"

interpretation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was due to his insistence not

that the story ultimately derived (via myth) from ancient ritual, a notion then

generally acknowledged if not very interesting,7 but that the poem exploits a living

ritual known to its author and audiences:

...ceremonies and fragments of dramatic ritual such as those to which the story

of the contest between the Green Knight and ... Gawain .. unmistakably relates

were by no means things of the past in the poet's own time; . . they were, on the

contrary, still being practised among the people, both high and low, ... and

therefore such a poet could count on his audience's familiarity with such

things.8

ooo

This is eloquent, fascinating and exciting, and one would dearly love to believe all of

it, but few would now accept the "anthropological approach'” as a valid means of

interpreting late-medieval English literature. Engaged in what is intended to be a

constructive rehabilitation I shall not dwell on the refutation of the approach,9 but a

few basic points may be in order. The foundation of the edifice was provided by the

German and English “evolutionary" anthropology associated particularly with the

names of Tylor, Mannhardt, and Sir James Frazer (of The Golden Bough)10 of which

it is enough to say that by the time Speirs was writing the school was two generations

out of date, and its methods and documentation had been comprehensively refuted.11

The problem, as Francis Utley noted, was not so much that Speirs deployed

anthropology in his criticism -- he was far from the last to do so -- as that he deployed

bad anthropology.1

More specifically, since the time Speirs wrote even folklorists (to whom he quite

reasonably appealed) have ceased to claim that folk drama and custom derive from an

ancient fertility cult,13 thus leaving Speirs vulnerable to the logical complaint of C.S.

Lewis that in forging a link between a prehistoric ritual of which we otherwise know

very little and a medieval literature of which we otherwise know quite a lot, Speirs

has taught us something about the ritual, not about the literature.14

6

Against this background it is disturbing to find that the revised New Pelican

Guide to English Literature, in what became vol. I, part 1, Chaucer and the

Alliterative Tradition, reprinted Speirs' introductory essay largely as it stands. It is

admittedly supplemented by a mildly apologetic postscript from Derek Pearsall,15

but on the other hand the essay's discussion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was

considerably expanded with material from Speirs' book, Medieval English Poetry,

effectively enhancing its "anthropological" character.16

ooo

It remains, more positively, to explore whether Speirs may not after all, in a yet

longer critical perspective, be hailed as a precursor of some of the more promising

recent trends in the appreciation of medieval English literature. In offering this thesis

I explicitly exclude two of the more prominent trends which might have been

expected to figure in discussion.

There is, firstly, what might be termed a neo-anthropological approach to early

literature which similarly deploys anthropology in literary appreciation, only now a

more up-to-date variety, particularly that associated with the ritual theories of Victor

Turner. But in discerning a ritual element which is somehow inherent in a literary

work, rather than derived via ancestry from, or historical juxtaposition with, ritual, it

is the heir not so much of Speirs as of Northrop Frye, for whom drama was so

basically ritualistic that it did not matter "two pins" whether the ritual concerned

ever existed or no.17 Here too I should prefer to leave the question to anthropologists,

as it is essentially an anthropological rather than a literary question.

Much closer, at least at first sight, to the historical realities, is the approach to

late-medieval and early-modern literature inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais

and his World, of which an English translation became available in 1968. This is an

eloquent and persuasive attempt to demonstrate that the works of Rabelais reflect,

are inspired by, or transpose into literary mode, the world and world-view of popular

carnival, with all the vigour, colour, sense of release, inversions, chaos

democratisation and this-worldliness of festival; persuasive that is until it is

appreciated that very little independent evidence is offered for the nature of

contemporary carnival and the popular attitudes towards it. As Carlo Ginsburg has

rightly noted, "The protagonists of popular culture ..., the peasants and the artisans,

speak to us almost exclusively through the words of Rabelais".18

Approaches to early English literature and theatre inspired by Bakhtin could do

more to ask the peasants and craftsmen what they thought about carnival since the

evidence, thanks to the efforts of both social historians and students of the early

theatre, is becoming available in increasing quantities.19 The carnivalesque approach

is characterized not so much by bad anthropology as by incomplete ethnography.

And it is a new ethnography of late-medieval England that is needed if the more

promising potential in Speirs' approach is to be realized, a clear delineation and

7

analysis of the existence and nature of custom as an essential preliminary to

discussion of its relationship with or contribution to medieval literature, free from

both the mumbo-jumbo of ritualism and the wishful thinking of carnivalism. It is

distinct from, if nonetheless part of, the emergent critical approach discerning the

"textualization of folkloric materials" as a significant feature of medieval literature20 in

that (as Speirs, in his way, realized) some literary texts, rather than merely

textualizing custom, are the texts of customs.

With regard to the customs themselves, as already suggested the task of

historical reconstruction is well under way with the parallel (and as yet insufficiently

coordinated) efforts of theatre historians, social historians (among whom folk customs

have emerged as revealing symptoms of social relationships and tensions), and a new

and tougher breed of folklorists (who are providing accurate documentation on

recent phases of customs as a reliable point of departure for cautious extrapolation

into a not too distant past).21 The task is far from complete, but it is possible of offer a

few suggestions, with illustrations, of how a better understanding of the relationship

between literature and custom may enhance the historical accuracy of our

appreciation of the former.

For it is, if unknowingly, identification of the relevance of custom in

understanding medieval literature which may be Speirs’ long term contribution.

Custom, in the sense of traditional performances (ceremonies, pastimes,

entertainments) closely integrated into the celebration of seasonal festivals

(Christmas, carnival, Whitsun) or special occasions (weddings, christenings, wakes)

was an essential, perhaps even definitive feature of late- medieval civilization, quite

independently of its ultimate origins, however arcane or fascinating in themselves.22

Medieval culture was a highly customary society, and an understanding of custom

will inevitably enhance the historical appreciation of its literature.

ooo

The simplest relationship occurs when a literary work, typically a narrative,

describes, as a part of its narration, activities which are customs, or in some way

clearly related to them. The classic instance of this is the irruption of the Green

Knight into the Christmas feast of the Arthurian court in Sir Gawain and the Green

Knight with his challenge that a knight of the round table participate in what has

since become known as the “beheading game": to behead the challenger (with the

axe brought to this end) on promise of the challenger being accorded a return blow in

a twelvemonth.23 Much discussion of this scene in relation to custom focusses on its

relationship to the recent mummers' plays, or the primitive custom of which they

claimed to be the surviva1.24 But much more significant for understanding what is

happening in this encounter is to juxtapose it with the "house-visit" customs,

medieval and modern, to which it is clearly related, and whose immediate functions

are more significant than their ultimate origins.25 For in terms of the relationship

8

between visitors and hosts such customary incursions can be:

exactive (“begging visits", quêtes or gatherings), demanding money or

refreshment;

convivial (e.g. mummings), inviting participation in pastime;

mischievous, inflicting embarrassment or inconvenience through interference

with persons or property;

benevolent, expressing good wishes for the season and the future;

beneficent (“good luck” visits), conferring (it is believed) good health, prosperity

and happiness;

9

malevolent (charivaris), declaring the rupture of good relationships and

expressing ill wishes;

maleficent ("direct action" charivaris), inflicting damage to property or injury to

persons, by natural or magical means;

deferential (“ courtesy" visits), acknowledging dependence and loyalty;

assertive, reiterating claims to rights and privileges.26

Many visit-customs, reality as usual failing to share academic enthusiasm for order,

display a mixture of these features and motivations, but it is nonetheless in the light

of this typology that we can properly perceive the Gawain-poet’s skill in the

deliberately ambiguous signals offered (to us and the Arthurian court) as to the

precise nature of the incursion.

The Green Knight invites participation in “a Crystemas gomen" (1.283) which

would be appropriate fora convivial visit-custom like amumming, in which

visitors and hosts play at dice, or the latter attempt to guess the identity of the

former. Such Christmas games or “gambols” could indeed involve contests of

strength and dexterity, likethe "gambols and juggling and twenty such tricks" in

which "Robin Hood put them all down" at the Christmas revels of his uncle,

Gamwel of Great Gamwel Hall, described in some detail in a seventeenth-century

broadside ballad.27

The way the game is designed to assesses the qualities of his hosts resembles a

variant tradition of rather more mischievous convivial visits in which the visitors

challenge their counterparts to show their mettle, for example in singing. An early

sixteenth-century carol preserves what is clearly such a customary visitor's jovial

invitation to his hosts to join in such sport. It opens with the classic greetings and the

"in come I" formula of the house-visit (actually the burden of the carol), followed by

a request for a hospitable welcome:

Bon jowre, bon iowre a vous!

I am cum vnto this hows

Vith par la pompe, I say

Is ther any good man here

That will make me any chere?

And if there were, I wold cum nere

to wit what he wold say.

In following stanzas he "apposes" various members of the household,

commenting on their appearance and their likely ability to contribute to the

singing: "Syng softe, I say, lest yowr nose blede..."; "Ye syng nether good tenowre,

treble, ne mene ..."; "Me thynkith ye shuld bere a very good bace/ To a pot of good

aleor ipoocras... ”.28

10

The Green Knight's disparaging remarks about the court are more like a

malevolent charivari, however,29 and what he actually proposes (depending on

whether the slaying is real or feigned, one-way or reciprocal) is mischievous or

downright maleficent. Arthur's equation of the event, after the Green Knight ha

sgone, with the "Layking of enterludez" (l. 472) may be a brilliant and

psychologically astute recovery, for interludes, in the sense of dramatic

entertainments at household revels, may have been associated in the late-medieval

mind with deferential visits from subordinates, the rewarding of whose efforts is

duly recorded in the household accounts: "interlude" is used in this sense

somewhat later of the performance of "Pyramus and Thisbe" by local citizens at

the Athenian court in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Knight's Dream.30 If so, Arthur

achieves a highly specific putting of the Green Knight in his social (and

customary) place.

While the Green Knight’s incursion at Camelot comes close to being , or closely

imitating, a seasonal house-visit custom, the analogous irruption of Grendel into the

Danish King’s Hall, Heorot, in Beowulf, is merely a parallel whose reception and

interpretation by its audience may have been coloured by reminiscences of

customary visits by figures in monstrous or beast guise, if any existed at the time.31

Interestingly the homicidal visits in the Icelandic sagas generally reckoned to be

Beowulf analogues take place specifically and exclusively at Christmas, and are

matched by a well-documented Scandinavian tradition of Christmas mummings by a

threatening, monstrous figure, the gryla, "a female troll with several tails carrying a

big bag ... she is said to bring harm to the house, and if she is not appeased with a gift

she will take the children and put them in the bag".32 Such references or analogues to

custom in narratives may also have contextual implications, as it has also been

suggested that the festive and game elements in works such as Sir Gawain and the

Green Knight and Chaucer's "Miller's Tale" are not merely reflections of custom, but

would make the works themselves appropriate for performance under customary,

festive auspices.33

ooo

Drama too can include occasional references to custom in the text of plays whose

explication is facilitated by knowledge of the custom concerned, but more significant

are the transpositions by which a seasonal custom becomes part of the action of a

play. This can be an implicit parallel, when the dramatic action is merely analogous

to the custom; for example the morality-play convention of a Vice putting a Virtue in

the stocks34 is almost certainly intended to evoke connotations of the misrule of the

seasonal Festive Lord, which included, as we shall shortly see, this power of coercion.

Similarly the proffering of gifts to the Christ-child by shepherds or Magi in the

mystery plays may for many spectators have startled reminiscences of the seasonal

good-will visits of dependents to lords bringing gifts and greetings (the ultimate origin,

11

probably, of the court masque): the (fictional) season is right; the context -- an

incursion of pastorally- or regally-costumed visitors -- is right; the performance itself --

a sequence in which each figure steps forward in turn with a brief speech -- is also

right.35 If medieval English schoolboys, like their continental counterparts, engaged in

Twelfth Night mummings dressed as the Three Kings (with an illuminated star on a

pole) the analogy will have been more complex.36 And since we are comparing one

form of performance culture with another, this implicit parallel should enhance our

appreciation of how the scene was performed (and how it might be performed in

modern original-staging productions), as well as of what was in the minds of the

audience as they saw it.

The parallel between custom and dramatic action can also be more explicit, as

when in the N. Town Cycle the buffeting of Christ takes the form of the traditional

revels game of "hot cockles", with the blindfolded victim having to guess who struck

him,37 but can further amount to what is effectively a transposition of custom to

drama (i.e. the dramatization of custom) in the sense that the actual performance of a

custom is part of the plot of the play: the disguising in the Tudor interlude Fulgens

and Lucres, for example.38

Most fundamentally, the relationship between drama and custom takes the

form of identity, the medieval performance of a given play itself part of, integral to, a

custom. Indeed it might be feasible to define a tradition of "medieval" drama which

was distinctively, inherently, customary. Prior to the rise of the professional players,

and excluding whatever was on offer from travelling minstrels, most forms of

medieval drama (including the semi-dramatic varieties we tend to treat separately as

pageantry) were customary in that their performance was seasonal, or linked to

occasions (typically weddings) which prompted behaviour reminiscent of (and often

borrowed directly from) seasonal festival. In some cases, such as the Tudor

interludes, the festival -- normally the winter revels of an aristocratic or institutional

household -- merely provided the context for performance, whose content probably,

and whose dramaturgy certainly, will have reflected the physical and psychological

circumstances. In others, the integration or identity of performance and custom was

more organic. This is most obviously the case with the various mummings and

disguisings whose texts (for example Lydgate's) have survived, and the same applies

to the court masques that succeeded them. The available texts are not literary works

performed in the context of a custom, they are partial records of customs whose

performance included a textual element.

Of the drama associated with the great summer-season festivals like Whitsun

and Midsummer, from a Robin Hood Play to a Corpus Christi Cycle, some forms, in

the manner of the Tudor interlude, may have featured in, without basically being

defined by, the communal feasting (for example the church ale) customary on such

occasions. The so-called commonplace book of churchwarden Robert Reynes of Acle

in Norfolk has preserved a precious fifteenth-century confirmation of this link

between drama and custom in the form of an epilogue to a (lost and unidentifiable)

play whose performance has evidently been an essential preliminary to the parochial

12

ale which, we are told, will now ensue:

Soueryns alle in same,

ye that arne come to sen oure game,

we pray you alle in goddys name

to drynke ar ye pas.

For an Ale is here ordeyned be a comely assent

for alle maner of people that apperyn here this day,

Vnto holy chirche to ben in-cressement

all that excedith the costes of oure play.39

Others however may have been structurally a part of customary observances

associated with the festivals, notably the perambulation of the vicinity and

neighbouring communities to advertise a coming village wake or ale, or to collect

money and provisions (for making bread and ale) which would be deployed in its

support. In the first capacity they are effectively performing the banns for any

dramatic entertainment associated with the forthcoming festival, in the second they

are performing the "gathering" (i.e. of money, not people) whose financial

consequences persistently appear in the financial records of the households donating

the money and the parishes receiving and using it (for a church ale). And there are

some medieval dramatic texts we may be tempted to associate with such customary

activity.

This is explicitly the case with William Dunbar's early sixteenth-century “The

manere of the crying of ane playe", whose speaker (a comically small Syrian giant)

addresses the city officers of Edinburgh and the assembled citizenry at the city cross

inviting them, amidst much verbal humour, "to follow furth on Robyn Hude",

presumably a May-day procession leading to the venue for the performance of the

play of which, one MS version has it, this is the "dwarf's part".40 The same probably

also applies to the so-called "Cupar Banns" of 1552 advertising a forthcoming

performance of Lyndsay's Satire of the Three Estates (itself evidently a substantial

festive event) with their interesting and possibly significant anticipation of figures and

plot-elements from the modern English mummers' plays.41

And what, finally, of the staging of the mystery cycles and other guild or

civic plays? Single-venue performance at Whitsun, Midsummer or Corpus Christi

will merely bring the plays into the context of whatever else is going on by way of

festivity and custom at the time and place concerned (which could evidently be

quite considerable, and so of considerable significance for the medieval experience

of the play and therefore our understanding of it) .But could it be, further, that

the processional, station-to-station performance characteristic of some local

traditions should be equated (or at least juxtaposed) with the custom of the

perambulatory gathering leading up to a festival rather than the liturgical Corpus

Christi procession? The former, as early references to local gatherers with their

13

"game" suggest, could involve spectacular or even semi-dramatic performances,

and their modern analogues or survivals, the plough-trailings, sword dances, and

mummers' plays (particularly, come to think of it, in northern provincial cities)

have this same form as a parade between stations at which the performers pause for

amore substantial set piece of a show.41

ooo

Potentially the most significant implications of a revived anthropological approach

concern the appreciation, historical and contextual, of the body of texts

conventionally, and somewhat misleadingly, anthologized and interpreted as “Middle

English Lyrics". Like narratives, some can merely refer to customs, and here a

knowledge of the customs concerned, their ethos and social function can contribute,

if in a rather pedestrian fashion, to enhanced appreciation. Take for instance the

unfortunate village wench who "Ladd ... the daunce a Myssomur Day" with

seductively "smale trippus", only to be got with child by "Jak, oure haly-watur

clerk".43 We may eventually understand her, her situation, and how she got into it,

better, if and when social historians resolve their ongoing statistical controversy on

whether the pre-modern incidence of conceptions in general, and illegitimate

conceptions in particular, shows a seasonal pattern with peaks around major calendar

festivals.44 This is mere “background", however, compared to the essential

appreciation that many if not most “Middle English lyrics" are songs, intended for

performance, in some cases (for example caroles) to the accompaniment of dance, in

others (or more of the same) with dramatic or semi-dramatic action.45 This being the

case, given the importance of custom in medieval culture, it is not entirely surprising

that some Middle English lyrics should properly be seen as not merely describing or

invoking custom, but as actually a part of it.

The celebrated "Boar's Head Carol" is the most obvious, if not very dramatic,

instance of a lyric-as-custom,46 the “Mumming of the Seven Philosophers" a good

deal more dramatic, if rather obviously misplaced in an anthology of lyrics. This

fifteenth-century text is headed Festum Natalis Domini,47 and opens with a speech of

four (rhyme royal) stanzas by a Presenter later (when he concludes the show)

identified in a marginal note as "Nuncius”.This is indeed his function, for after a

pious invocation of the gospel events the season celebrates he brings greetings from

afar to the lord of the feast on which the visitors intrude:

Senek the sage that kyng ys of desert,

Regent and rewler of all wyldernesse,

Sendeth gretyng with all entier hert

Vnto yow hys brother kyng of Crystmas (ll. 8-11).

The context is evidently the Christmas revels of a household under the

14

jurisdiction of its temporary “Christmas King”, very likely, in view of the

scholarly matter, the boy-bishop of an ecclesiastical foundation. According to

the herald, Seneca, having heard of his “brother’s” sudden elevation, wishes to

proffer him good advice on how to exercise his power: “letting yow wete with

hertly tendyrnes / What longeth now vnto youre astate royall / That ye be

now to so suddenly call’d” (ll. 12-14). To this end Seneca has sent seven

philosophers who will expound the necessary “good rules”, “as ye shall here”

(l. 25), and there follow seven one-stanza speeches assigned in marginal notes

to “Primus Philosophus", "Secundus", "Tercius", etc., evidently delivered in

turn by performers representing these figures and doubtless costumed accordingly.

The wisdom they offer is solid, conventional stuff (“ Mesure ys tresure"; "Of elther

men ye shall your myrrour make"), although in these particular circumstances some

of it may be tongue-in-cheek (“rule your body with a good diet”). The speech of the

fifth philosopher in favour of generosity may be specifically appropriate to the

auspices of the performance; the recommendations of the seventh in favour of

periodic relaxation certainly are:

Who that lakketh rest may nat long endure;

Therefore among take your ease and dysport,

Delyte yow neuer in besynes ne cure

But that other whyle ye may eft resort

To play, recreacion, and comfort. (11.71-75)

As if to prove the point, the general and individual presentations over, the Nuncius

announces that the show will conclude with a song:

And in your presence afore her passage,

They purpose all afore yaw for to syng,

Yef to your hyghnes hit myght be plesyng. (11. 82-84)

Just what song is not specified; presumably anything traditional would do.

Somewhere in between -- with dramatic qualities sufficiently substantial, but

sufficiently obscured, to warrant explication -- are the carols which seem to be

associated with ceremonial performances in the context of a household’s Christmas

revels. Although surviving in different sources, they can indeed be arranged into a

calendrical sequence, opening with a carol whose burden places it at the very

beginning of the revels season:

Farewele, Aduent; Cristemas is cum;

Farewele fro vs both alle and surne.48

The stanzas themselves suggest very strongly that the Advent taken leave of is not an

15

abstract personification but a figure, perhaps dressed in penitential garb, ceremonially

(if perhaps unceremoniously) expulsed from the venue of the feasting:

Thou maist not dwelle with none eastate;

Therfore with vs thou playest chekmate.

Go hens, or we will breke thy pate!

This tyme of Cristes feest natall

We will be mery, grete and small,

And thou shalt goo oute of this halle.

That the Christmas who “is cum" was also mimetically represented (perhaps by the

16

household or institution's Christmas King or Lord of Misrule) is confirmed by a

further text, which preserves, if indirectly, a dialogue between “Sir Christmas",

apparently at the door, and someone inside the banqueting hall.49 The burden is

evidently designed for performance par personnages (I have put Christmas's lines in

italics):

"Nowell, nowell, nowell, nowell."

"Who ys there that syngith so, Nowell, nowell, nowell?”

"Iam here, Syre Cristemasse"

"Welcome, my lord Ser Cristesmasse,

Wellcome to vs all, bothe more and lasse,

Come nere, nowell."

In the stanzas Sir Christmas addresses the assembled company directly, bringing

news of the Nativity story, and then taking charge of the revelry:

Bevvex bien par tutte la company,

Make gode chere and be ryght mery,

And syng with vs now joyfully:

Nowell, ...

In another song the festive lord proclaims his laws for the feast: all must contribute

some entertainment, and those who refuse are to be put into the stocks.50 The stocks

were among the regular appurtenances of his office and used for the punishment of

those who fail to obey his temporary rule. In the mid-sixteenth century the

appurtenances of the royal court's Lord of Misrule included (as well as a throne and

canopy, and 13 hobby horses) a pillory, a gibbet, a block and stocks.51 The cycle ends

with a sad little piece in which the Christmas Lord, probably as part of a Candlemas

ceremony, takes leave of the household:

Now haue gud day, now haue gud day!

I am Crystmas, and now I go my way.

Here haue I dwellyd with more and lasse

From Halowtyde till Candylmas,

And now must I from hens passe;

Now haue gud day!

He must bid farewell to "kyng and knyght,/ And erle, baron, and lady bryght", for he

thinks he hears "Lent doth call", but he hopes to return "Anoder yere" to "Make

mery in this hall".52 These are extreme cases, where a “lyric" is to all intents and

purposes the script of a song performed as part of a custom, but the performance of

17

most lyrics or songs with a seasonal appropriateness may well have been to a degree

customary at the appropriate observances or revelry, and I have suggested elsewhere

that the fifteenth-century Sloane Manuscript is a “festive miscellany" of such items.53

ooo

Similarities and differences between Speirs' anthropological approach and the

approach urged here via the ascertainable customary relations and customary status

of literary texts can best be appreciated by juxtaposing his treatment of a particular

text with what is feasible now. “The Maiden in the Moor" is one of the most

mysterious of medieval lyrics, with its incantatory invocation of something that has

all the trappings of an initiation-rite:

Maiden in the mor lay,

In the mor lay,

Seuenyst fulle,

Seuenyst fulle;

Maiden in the mor lay,

In the mor lay,

Seuenistes fulle,

Seuenistes fulle

Ant a day.

Her food, subsequent stanzas reveal, was the primrose and the violet, her drink the

cold water of the well-spring, her bower the red rose and the lily-flower.54 It was

indeed an initiation (or “purification”) rite that sprang to Speirs' mind, together with

the worship of wells, as the context and purpose of the song: the maiden as "the spirit

of the well-spring" (a faery being or a human impersonator in a dramatic dance), and

"this poem may in fact have been connected with rites and dances designed to

promote fertility or in some other respect to influence the course of nature

magically".55 During the abeyance of the anthropological approach others have

suggested interpretations more in line with regular medieval culture: for example

the “maiden" as Maria Magdalene, who indeed, Langland's Piers Plowman says,

“by mores lyued and dewes ….56 Other Biblical women can also offer some

appropriate credentials: Abraham’s concubine, Hagar, banished with her son into

“the wilderness of Beer-sheba", is saved by "a well of water" at God’s intervention;

the beloved of the Song of Songs is assured that her bed will be flowery"; in

Revelations the woman clothed with the sun whose newborn child the dragon

sought to destroy “fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God,

that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and three-score days".57

The diametrical opposite of Speirs’ approach through folklore is D.W.

Robertson's "exegetical" interpretation of medieval literature as a multi-level

Christian allegory in the manner of Biblical commentary, and he accordingly

18

suggests that the seven nights represent life on earth, the day by which they are

followed the advent of Christ; the moor is the wilderness of this world under the Old

Testament dispensation, while the primrose as fleshly beauty gives way to the violet

of humility; the water of the well is God's grace, the roses represent charity, the lilies

purity, and the maiden is the Virgin Mary.58 It is doubtful however if this weight of

learning is compatible with the now fairly certain status of the text as the words to an

evidently popular song, sung and (as Speirs surmised) danced as a customary feature

of customary seasonal merriment. A fairly broad hint is provided by the fourteenth-

century collection of songs in the "Red Book of Ossory" associated with the cathedral

at Kilkenny, in Ireland (nonetheless a distinctly English community).The songs are

in Latin and on religious themes, but these are closely related to major festivals,

notably Christmas (25 songs), and a contemporary note in the manuscript explains

that they were composed (or commissioned) by Bishop Richard Ledrede to replace

the songs, "lewd, secular, and associated with revelry", hitherto sung by the vicars,

priests and clerks of the cathedral on important holidays.59 The collection therefore

bears indirect witness to this tradition of institutional revelry, the more so as,

doubtless to ease the process of reform, the songs have apparently been written to fit

the tunes of existing, secular songs in English and French, identified in the

manuscript by a few words in vernacular verse. And if the latter were indeed the

secular pieces sung at the clerical revels of the cathedral household before the

bishop’s intervention, then perhaps he had reason to be concerned, as those that can

be identified include four songs of unhappy love, a narrative of an amorous

encounter, the lament of a mal mariée, and our "Maiden in the Moor". The

affiliations of some of the other Latin songs of the Red Book to caroles, rondels and

rondes suggest that the revels of the Kilkenny clerks involved dance-songs as well as

mere singing, and a certain dramatic element is indeed indicated by Bishop

Ledrede’s complaining specifically of cantilenas teatralibus.60

The popular status and customary function of the song is further suggested by

citation of a variant of it in a fourteenth-century sermon, where it is designated a

karole, i.e. a ring- dance,61 and on the basis of German legends concerning the

analogous Moorjungfern, Peter Dronke plausibly speculates that performance may

have included dramatic mime involving the courting of the moor-maiden, in the

manner of the wooing-games familiar in medieval courtly and popular traditions.62

Such juxtaposing with, or contextualising in, documented medieval custom is

distinct from the "anthropological" discovery of primitive rites and beliefs embedded

in an ostensibly Christian literature. To the extent that, in Speirs’ handling of it, the

anthropological approach related medieval literary texts to medieval customs thought

to preserve those rites and beliefs, it has alerted us, the ritualist mumbo-jumbo once

abandoned, to an enduring and concrete reality: the reflections and transpositions of

custom in much medieval literature; the customary auspices and (particularly in the

case of drama and lyric) the customary status of a significant segment of medieval

literature. Further progress along these lines must await the culmination of the

ongoing projects, described earlier, establishing exactly what these customs were.

19

NOTES

1. John Speirs, "Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight", Scrutiny, 16 (1949), 274-

300; Wynnere and Wastoure", Scrutiny, 17 (1950-51), 221-52; "The Mystery Cycle",

Scrutiny, 18 (1951-52), 86-117 & 246-65.

2. John Speirs, Medieval English Poetry: The Non-Chaucerian Tradition

(London, 1957).

3. John Speirs, "A Survey of Middle English Verse", The Pelican Guide to English

Literature, ed. Boris Ford, Vol. I, The Age of Chaucer (Harmondsworth, 1954;

repr. 1967), pp. 17-67.

4. E.g. Medieval English Poetry, p. 220; Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance

(Cambridge, 1920). For the rejection of Weston's views in mainstream

Arthurian scholarship see R.S. Loomis, "The Origins of the Grail Legends", in

Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. Loomis (1959; repr. Oxford, 1974),

particularly pp.278-9, and The Grail. From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol

(Cardiff, 1963), Preface, p. ix.

5. E.g. Medieval English Poetry, p. 163; Margaret Murray, The Witch Cult in

Western Europe (Oxford, 1921); The God of the Witches (London, 1931). For

the current assessment of Murray's thesis and the damage it inflicted on English

folklore studies see Jacqueline Simpson, "Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her,

and Why?" Folklore, 105 (1994), 89-96.

6. "Survey", p. 49. On the mummers' plays as survivals of this ritual see Medieval

English Poetry, p. 310, where Speirs appeals to the classic exposition of this

theory, E.K. Chambers, The English Folk Play (1933; repr. Oxford, 1969);

influential survivalist studies in more recent times have been Alan Brody, The

English Mummers and their Plays ( London, 1969) and Alex Helm, The

English Mummers' Play (Cambridge, 1980).

7. W.A. Nitze, "Is the Green Knight's Story a Vegetation Myth?" MP, 33 (1936),

351-66.

8. Medieval English Poetry, pp. 25-26; the Gawain-debate provoked by Speirs’

assertions is reviewed by Donald R. Howard, "Sir Gawain and the Green

Knight", in Recent Middle English Scholarship and Criticism, ed. J. Burke

Severs (Pittsburgh, 1971), pp.41-52, and Francis Utley, “Anglicanism and

Anthropology: C.S. Lewis and John Speirs", SFQ, 31 (1967), 1-11.

9. Effectively achieved in C.S. Lewis, "The Anthropological Approach", English

and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Norman Davis & C.L.

Wrenn (London, 1962), pp. 219-30 and R.H. Robbins, "Middle English

Misunderstood: Mr Speirs and the Goblins", Anglia, 85 (1967), 270-285.

10. J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough. A Study of Magic and Religion (Cambridge,

1890); Wilhelm Mannhardt, Wald- und Feldkulte (Berlin, 1875-7); E.B. Tylor,

Primitive Culture (London, 1871).

11. ClaudeLevi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobsen (1968;repr.

20

Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 206-7; Godfrey Lienhart, Social Anthropology

(London, 1964), pp.33-4; E.R. Leach, in Man and Culture, ed. R. Firth

(London, 1957), p.121; J. Fontenrose, The Ritual Theory of Myth (Berkeley,

1966); Mary Douglas, "Judgements on James Frazer", Daedalus, 107 (1978), 151-

164; E.R. Leach, "Golden Bough or Gilded Twig?", ibid ., 90 (1961), 371-387;

Robert Ackerman, J.G. Frazer: His Life and Work (Cambridge, 1987).

12. Francis Utley, "Anglicanism and Anthropology: C.S. Lewis and John

Speirs", Southern Folklore Quarterly, 31 (1967), 1-11.

13. Roger D. Abrahams, "Folk Drama", in Folklore and Folk Life: An Introduction,

ed. R.M. Dorson (Chicago, 1972), pp.351-62; Georgina Smith/Boyes, "Social Bases of

Tradition: The Limitations of 'The Search for Origins'", Language, Culture and

Tradition, ed. A. E. Green & J.D.A. Widdowson (Sheffield, 1981), pp.77-87, "Excellent

Examples: The Influence of Exemplar Texts on Traditional Drama Scholarship",

Traditional Drama Studies, 1 (1985), 21-30, and "Cultural Survivals Theory and

Traditional Customs. An Examination of the effects of privileging on the Form and

Perception of Some English Calendar Customs", Folk Life, 26 (1987- 8), 5-11; E.C.

Cawte, “’It’s an Ancient Custom'-- But How Ancient?", Aspects of British Calendar

Customs, ed. Theresa Buckland and Juliette Wood (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic

Press, 1993), pp. 37-56.

14. Lewis, "The Anthropological Approach".

15. "Postscript: Changing Perspectives", The New Pelican Guide to English

Literature, ed. Boris Ford, Vol. I, part 1, Chaucer and the Alliterative Tradition

(Harmondsworth, 1982), p.97-102.

16. Although this in turn actually compensates for the replacement of the original

edition’s distinctly ritualist essay on Sir Gawain (by Francis Berry) with a

contribution from J.A. Burrow deploying a quite different emphasis.

17. Linda Woodbridge & Edward Berry, eds., True Rites and Maimed Rites. Ritual

and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press),

1992; Richard A. Hardin, "'Ritual' in Recent Criticism: The Elusive Sense of

Community", PMLA , 98 (1983), 846-62; Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of

Criticism (1957; repr. Princeton,1973), p.109.

18. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (Cambridge, Mass., 1968); Carlo

Ginsburg, The Cheese and the Worms (Harmondsworth, 1982), p.xvii.

19. Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theatre. Plebeian Culture and the Structure of

Authority in Renaissance England (London: Methuen, 1985; repr. London:

Routledge, 1990); Anthony Gash, "Carnival against Lent: The Ambivalence of

Medieval Drama", Medieval Literature. Ideology and History, ed. David Aers

(Brighton, 1986),pp. 74-98; J.M. Ganim, Chaucerian Theatricality (Princeton,

1990); Jan Cook, "Carnival and The Canterbury Tales: ’Only equals may

laugh'", Medieval Literature. Criticism, Ideology and History, ed. David Aers

(Brighton, 1986), pp. 169-91. For the documentation on early custom see the

volumes in the Toronto Records of Early English Drama series and the

following studies of social history: R.W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in

21

English Society 1700-1850 (Cambridge, 1973); Bob Bushaway, By Rite:

Custom and Community in England, 1700-1900 (London, 1982); David

Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion. Popular Politics and Culture in

England, 1603-1660 (Oxford, 1985); Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century

England , ed. Barry Reay (London, 1985); Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of

Merry England. The Ritual Year 1400 - 1700 (Oxford, 1994).

20. Nancy Mason Bradbury, "Gentrification and the Troilus", ChauR., 28 (1994),

305-329. See also Carl Lindahl, Earnest Games: Folkloric Patterns in the

Canterbury Tales (Bloomington, 1989).

21. S. Roud, Mumming Plays in Berkshire (Andover, 1980) and Mumming Plays

in Oxfordshire (Sheffield, 1984); S. Roud & P.Marsh, Mumming Plays in

Hampshire (Andover, 1980); P.T. Millington, Nottinghamshire Folk Plays and

Related Customs (Long Eaton, 1980); Christmas Mumming in Newfoundland.

Essays in Anthropology, Folklore and History, ed. Herbert Halpert & G.R.

Storey (Toronto, 1966); Henry Glassie, All Silver and No Brass: An Irish

Christmas Mumming (Bloomington, 1975); Aspects of British Calendar

Customs, ed. Teresa Buckland & Juliette Wood (Sheffield, 1991).

22. For some comments on the importance of custom to medieval civilization, and

studies confirming it, see Thomas Pettitt & Leif Søndergaard, eds., Custom,

Culture and Community (Odense, 1994).

23. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J.R.R.Tolkien & E.V. Gordon, 2nd edn.

rev. N. Davis (Oxford, 1967), ll. 136ff.

24. Claude Luttrell, "The Folk-Tale Elements in Sir Gawain and the Green

Knight", SP, 77 (1980), 105-127; J.A. Burrow, A Reading of Sir Gawain and the

Green Knight (London, 1965), p. 21.

25. Frederick B. Jonassen, "Elements from the Traditional Drama of England in

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies,

17 (1986), 221-54, comes closer to this approach, although still seeking links to

the mummers' plays.

26. See my "Customary Encounters: The Sociology and Dramaturgy of Traditional

Drama", forthcoming in Folk Music Journal.

27. "Robin Hood's Birth, Breeding, Valour and Marriage", in The English and

Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. F.J. Child (1882-98; repr. New York, 1965),

No.149, sts. 15- 20; a classic account of Christmas revels -- a latter-day Sir

Gawain and the Green Knight in this respect, encompassing mass in the

chapel, dinner in the hall, carols, and pastimes.

28. The Early English Carols, ed. R.L. Greene, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1977), No. 420.

We need not follow Greene (Notes, p. 468) in taking the singer to be a

professional entertainer.

29. For the charivari see Violet Alford, "Rough Music or Charivari", Folklore,

70 (1959), 505-518 and (for a house-visit variant) B.H. Cunnington, "A

'Skimmington in 1618", Folklore, 41 (1930), 288-290.

30. REED York ed. A.F. Johnson & M. Rogerson (Toronto, 1979), vol. I, p. 2;

22

A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks, Arden Shakespeare

(London, 1979), V.ii.5.

31. Beowulf, ed. C.L. Wrenn (London, 1958), ll. 115ff., 710ff.; Anglo-Saxon

penitentials complain of a New Year custom of going about dressed as a stag or

calf, but it is doubtful whether they refer to actual practice; see Rudolph

Arbesmann, "The Cervuli and Anniculae of Caesarius of Arles", Traditio, 35

(1979), 89-119.

32. Beowulf and its Analogues, ed. G.N. Garmonsway & J. Simpson (New York,

1971), pp. 105 (Hrolfs saga kraka); 303, 306, 312a (Grettissaga); Iørn Piø,

"Charistmas Traditions in Scandinavia", in Custom, Culture and Community

in the later Middle Ages, ed. Thomas Pettitt & Leif Søndergaard (Odense,

1994), pp.57- 70, at p.60.

33. Roy Peter Clark, "Christmas Games in Chaucer's The Miller's Tale", Studies in

Short Fiction, 13 (1976), 277-289; J.R. Hulbert, "Syr Gawyn and the Grene

Kny3t", MP, 13 (1915-16), 433-462 & 869-730, at p. 719.

34. T.W. Craik, The Tudor Interlude (Leicester, 1967), pp. 93-96.

35. The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle, ed. A.C. Cawley (Manchester,

1958; repr. 1968), 3, Prima Pastorum, 11. 454ff.; 4, Secunda Pastorum, 11. 710ff.;

The Towneley Plays, ed. G. England & A.W. Pollard, EETS. es.71 (London,

1897; repr. 1968), XIV, Oblacio magorum, 11.547ff. Cf. Enid Welsford, The

Court Masque (Cambridge, 1927).

36. ThomasPettitt, “Ritual and Vaudeville: The Dramaturgy of the English Folk

Plays", Traditional Drama Studies, 2 (1988), 45-68.

37. Ludus Coventriae, ed. K.S. Block, EETS.es 120 (1922; repr. London, 1960),

"Passion Play II", 11. 159ff.

38. The Plays of Henry Medwall, ed. Alan Nelson (Cambridge, 1980), Fulgens and

Lucres, 2.377ff.

39. Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. Norman Davis, EETS. ss. 1 (London,

1970), XIII.B.

40. William Dunbar, Poems, ed. James Kinsely (1958; repr. Oxford: Clarendon,

1966), No. 46. For the context see Anna Jean Mill, Medieval Plays in Scotland (

Edinburgh, 1927), pp. 19-35.

41. The Works of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount 1490-1555, ed. Douglas Hamer,

vol. II, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, STS (Edinburgh & London, 1931),

"Proclamation maid in cowpar of fyffe".

42. On the station-to-station performance of mystery cycles see William Tydeman,

English Medieval Theatre 1400 - 1500 (London, 1986), ch. 4; on late-medieval

gatherings Alexandra F. Johnston, "Summer Festivals in the Thames Valley

Counties", in Custom, Culture and Community in the Later Middle Ages, ed.

T. Pettitt & Leif Søndergaard (Odense, 1994), pp. 37-56.

43. Early English Carols, ed. Greene, No. 453.

44. G.R. Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives. Peasants and Illicit Sex in

Early Seventeenth Century England (London, 1979), p. 77; Peter Laslett, The

23

World We Have Lost, 3rd edn. (London, 1983), p. 158.

45. Greene, ed., Early English Carols, Introduction, I.3, '"The Carol at Feasts and

Banquets"; II, "The Carol as Dance-Song".

46. Early English Carols, ed. Greene, No. 132. For speculative discussion of the

origins of the ceremony see James E. Spears, "The Boar's Head Carol",

Folklore, 85 (1974), 194-8, and A.K. Moore, The Secular Lyric in Middle

English (1950; repr. Westport, 1971), p. 167.

47. Trinity College Cambridge MS. 599, printed in Secular Lyrics of the XIVth

and XVth Centuries, ed. R.H. Robbins (Oxford, 1952), No. 120

48. Early English Carols, ed. Greene, No. 3.

49. Greene, No. 6.

50. Greene, No. 11.

51. E .K. Chambers, TheMedieval Stage,2vols. (Oxford,1903), I,406.

52. Greene, No. 141.

53. Thomas Pettitt, "'St Stephen and Herod'and the Songs of the Sloane

Manuscript", in Flemming G. Andersen et al., The Ballad as Narrative

(Odense, 1982), pp. 19- 38, at pp. 20-23.

54. Medieval English Songs, ed. E.J. Dobson & F. Ll. Harrison (London, 1979), No.

16b.

55. Medieval English Poetry, pp. 63-64.

56. Joseph Harris, "Maiden in the Mor Lay and the Medieval Magdalen Tradition",

Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1 (1971), 59- 87; Edmund Reiss,

The Art of the Middle English Lyric (Athens, Georgia, 1972), pp. 98-106; cf.

Piers Plowman, ed. W.W. Skeat (1886; repr. Oxford, 1954), B.xv.289.

57. See,respectively, King James Bible, "Genesis", XXI, 14ff.;Vulgate, "Cantica

Canticorum",I.16, (floridus: King James has merely "green");King James

Bible , "Revelations", XII, 6.

58. D.W.Robertson,Jr.,"Historical Criticism", English Institute Essays 1950, ed.

S . Downer (New York, 1951),pp. 3-31, at p.27.

59. R.L. Greene, ed., The Lyrics of the Red Book of Ossory ( Oxford, 1974), p.iv.

60. Greene, ed.cit., p. iii; lamely translated (p.iv) as "revelry". On dramatic features

of medieval French festive dance-songs see Joseph Bedier, "Les fetes de mai et les

commencements de la poesi lyrique au moyen-age", Revue des Deux Mondes,

4th ser., 135 (1896), 146-172.

61. Siegfried Wenzel, "The Moor Maiden -- A Contemporary View", Speculum, 49

(1974), 69-74.

62. Peter Dronke, The Medieval Lyric (London, 1968),pp. 195-6.