The Parsed Corpus of
Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
The Song of the Husbandman
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About the text:
About the edition and manuscript base:
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| Text name: | The Song of the Husbandman |
| Alternative names: | I heard men upon mold make much moan |
| Content: | The Song of the Husbandman is a social protest poem that criticizes Edward I's excessively high taxation. The poet must pay every fourth penny to the king, deal with abusive bailiffs, was deprived of his cattle, was forced to engage in bribery and had to sell his seed corn, leaving none for next year's seedtime. The poem is an important source for the economic, social, political, and religious situation in England in the late thirteenth and early fourtheenth century. The text is generally regarded as a valuable piece of literature, conveying in a formally sophisticated way the palpable feeling of exploitation and hopelessness felt by many husbandmen. It combines rhyme with alliteration, and sometimes links some stanzas with concatenation, repeating words in the first line of a stanza from the last line of the preceding stanza. It includes a lot of specialized agricultural and economic vocabulary. |
| Genre/subjects: | politics, complaint, satire, social protest, evils of the time, contemporary conditions, lament, taxation |
| Dialect of original composition: | Unknown the text was perhaps originally written "in Southern English" (Wells 1916: 229). |
| Date of original composition: | 1297-1310 The poem is "of before 1310 and perhaps of about 1297" (Wells 1916: 229). Poems in Ms. Harley 2253 with less alliteration, such as The Song of the Husbandman, were probably composed in the last half of the thirteenth century (Stemmler 1962). |
| Suggested date: | 1297 |
| PCMEP period: | 2a (1250-1300) |
| Versification: | six 12-line rhymed and alliterative stanzas, ababababcdcd |
| Index of ME Verse: | 696 (IMEV), 1320.5 (NIMEV) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 2198 |
| Wells: | 4.30 |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | Ich herdemen |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | Wright, Thomas. 1839. The Political Songs of England: From the Reign of John to that of Edward II. Camden Society o.s. 6. London: John Bowyer Nichols and Son. 149-52. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | London, British Library, Harley 2253, f. 64r |
| Online manuscript description: | Manuscripts of the West Midlands (item 34) Manuscript Description, British Library Digitsed Manuscript f. 64r, British Library eLALME |
| Manuscript dialect: | West-Midlands The scribe of the relevant part of the manuscript has been identified as a professional scribe working in Ludlow, in Southern Shropshire (Revard 1970). The manuscript is also linked to the West-Midlands in other ways. The binding incorporates fragments of financial accounts of a West-Midlands family called Mortimer, who had their main seat at Wigmore Castle in Herefordshire. Further, it also includes extracts from the ordinal of Herefordshire Cathedral (Ker 1965: xxii). |
| Manuscript date: | s. xiv-in, s. xiv-mid The relevant section of the manuscript has been dated to the 1330s - 1340s (Ker 1965, Revard 1970). The manuscript was originally believed to have been copied around 1310 (Wells 1916: 440) based on references to the death of Edward I (1307), then around 1320 because of references to the Battle of Bannockburn (1314), but now the scholarly consensus is that it cannot date from before 1340 since the latest political poem mentions Edward III (left for the Hundred Years War in 1338) (Stemmler 1962). The online version of the MED dates the manuscript to a1350, noting that it was "redated Nov 2017 from c1325 to a1350 after consultation with OED." |
About the file:
| File name: | M2b.Husbandman |
| ID: | Husbandman,w.x.y.z: w=page, x=line, y=token, z=stanza {[Stanza_1]-[Stanza_6]} |
| Word count: | 604 |
| Token count: | 70 |
| Line count: | 72 |
Other:
| General notes: | The Song of the Husbandman is part of the so-called Harley Lyrics, the finest anthology of secular and religious poems to survive from Middle English. Wright's (1839) edition does not indicate line numbers but they have been added to the parsed file. Line breaks follow the rhyming scheme as in Wright's (1839) edition. The parse is based on the translation provided at the bottom of the page in Wright's (1839) edition. |
| Remarks on parses: | ll. 5-20 are introduced by quotation marks. However, the content does not appear to be direct speech any more or less discernibly than the previous or subsequent material. The passage is not indicated as -SPE. In contrast, ll. 38-39 are introduced by quotation marks, are actual direct speech and are annotated accordingly. The following two passages are particularly hard to parse: l. 4 Ne kepeth here no sawe ne no song syng The line is split up into two tokens. A *con* subject is assumed from the previous line for the first token, which is a metaphorical extension from "good years" for "people" generally, 'They (=the people) preserve here no sayings'. The second token includes another *con* subject with the same referent, 'nor they (=the people) no songs sing' with an uninflected finite verb. ll. 29-30 Meni of religioun me halt hem ful hene, Baroun and bonde, the clerc and the knyht. The grammatical relations in this sentence are not quite clear. Either 'many of religion' is a left-dislocated object with a resumptive pronoun hem 'them' and the indefinite pronoun subject me 'one, they,' so that the sentence would mean 'One holds abject many of religion - barons, bondmen, clerks and knights.' Alternatively, 'many men of religion' is the subject with me 'men' as its head and hem as a reflexive pronoun 'themselves' so that the sentence would mean 'Many men of religion, barons, bondmen, clerks and knights, bear themselves odiously.' Finally, 'many men of religion' could again be the subject but with the pronoun hem 'them' as the object so that the sentence would mean 'Many men of religion hold in contempt those people, barons, bondmen, clerks and knights.' The second interpretation is used for the parse. |
References
Ker, Neil R. 1965. Facsimile of British Museum MS. Harley 2253. EETS o.s. 255. London: Oxford University Press.
Revard, Carter. 1970. 'Richard Hurd and MS Harley 2253.' Notes and Queries 224. 199-202.
Stemmler, Theo. 1962. 'Zur Datierung des MS. Harley 2253.' Anglia 80. 111-118.
Wells, John E. 1916. Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400. New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. (available online)
Wright, Thomas. 1839. The Political Songs of England from the Reign of John to that of Edward II. London: Camden Society. (available online)