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11 Poems by Laurence Minot

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About the text:
Text name: 11 Poems by Laurence Minot
Alternative names: Poems on the Wars of Edward III; The Poems of Laurence Minot; Poems on Interesting Events in the Reign of King Edward III
Content: The 11 Poems by Laurence Minot are political propaganda pieces. They celebrate the military victories of Edward III (reigned 1327-1377) over the French and the Scottish during the first phase of the Hundred Year's War and the Second War of Scottish Independence. Their tone is viciously nationalistic. The poems show no concern for balance or sympathy toward the enemy, but pure patriotism and devotion to the English cause. "They have little grace either of metre or diction; but they are filled with life and action, and express with straight-forward, vigorous utterance a nation's pride in battles won" (Reed 1912: 69). The following lines illustrate.

Wrote þai sal ʒowre dene,
Of dintes ʒe may ʒow dowt;
Ȝowre biginges sall men brene,
And breke ʒowre walles obout.
Ful redles may ʒe ren,
With all ʒowre rewful rout;
With care men sall ʒow ken
Edward ʒowre lord to lout.
'Root out, they shall your refuge,
Of blows, you may stand in fear,
Your dwellings, man shall burn down,
And break your walls everywhere.
Completely clueless, you may run,
With your entire lamentable company.
With sorrow, man shall teach you
to bow down to Edward, your lord.'
(Poem 6, lines 33-40)

The following table lists the subject matter of each poem:
Poem Content
1 Battle of Halidon Hill (1333)
2 Revenge for the Battle of Bannockburn (1314)
3 Edward in Brabant, Flanders and French sea raids (1338)
4 First Invasion of France (1339)
5 Sea Battle of Sluyce (1340)
6 The Siege of Tournay (1340)
7 The March through Normandy and Battle of Crécy (1346)
8 The Siege and Taking of Calais (1347)
9 Battle of Neville's Cross (1346)
10 Sea Battle against the Spanish (1350)
11 The Taking of Guînes (1351)
Genre/subjects: political propaganda, 100 Years' War, politics, Laurence Minot, King Edward III, war, epinicion, victory ode, patriotism, national pride
Dialect of original composition: Northern, (Northern) East Midlands
The text is largely Northern in origin. This is supported by the following observations:
(1) There are many Northern lexical items, such as big 'build', skrith 'slip away,' gate 'way' etc. Some of them occur in rhyming position and are therefore particularly likely to reflect the original, e.g. flay 'terrify' (rhyming with say, pray, way), Poem 9, line 17 (see Hall 1887: xvii for details).
(2) Verb placement facts, as described in Kroch & Taylor (1997), suggest a northern origin. The finite verb can be placed after a fronted constituent and before a subject pronoun.
With Edward think þai for to fight,
"With Edward, they intend to fight" (Poem 8, line 36)
Verb-second structures of this kind are typical of Northern, rather than Southern, Middle English texts.
(3) Hall (ibid.: xvii) also suggests that the general "alliterative style points in the same direction", i.e. of Northern provenance.
There is, however, also a Midland element in the author’s language. Since some of the relevant features occur in rhyming positions, they are likely to reflect the usage in the original.
Hall concludes that "the poet lived on the border-lands between the Northern and Midland areas; and to the east rather than the west" (ibid.: xvii). "Possibly Minot belonged to the Norfolk branch of the family" (ibid.: xviii).
Date of original composition: 1333-1352
The text consists of 11 individual poems. The first poem celebrates the English victory at the Battle of Halidon Hill, fought 19 July 1333. The poems must therefore have been written at some time after that date. The terminus post quem is progressively pushed backwards for every subsequent poem since they involve later historical events. The last poem narrates the capture of the town of Guînes in 1351 so that the entire collection of poems must have been in existence after that date.
The individual poems were probably first written close to the respective dates of the events they recount. "[A] writer of this kind of verse must treat the topic of the moment" (Hall 1887: xii). Thus, the language of the separate texts may be representative of Middle English at different time points covering a span of almost two decades.
However, the entire set of texts was probably revised and made more coherent in 1352. This second, editing step in the evolution of the poems has been acknowledged and largely accepted since the first printed edition of the text, where it is asserted that "these poems were written, or at least completed, in the beginning of the year 1352" (Ritson 1795: x). The following points evidence a re-writing of the text: "There are traces of revision [...] in the headings of the poems, in the use at v.41 of Henry of Derby's later title (conferred in 1352), in the inserted connecting link, iii.117-126, and in the added lines 57-70, 79-81, of the sixth piece" (Hall 1887: xii). For example, lines 57-70 of poem 6 show an awkward transition from confident bragging about the imminent capture of Tournay towards a resentful accusation of a Brabant traitor. The reason for this change in tone is evidently that the siege of Turnay eventually failed so that the poet had to adjust his text after the fact (Putter 2009: 119-20).
The online version of the Middle English Dictionary lists the date of the original as "c1333-52."
Suggested date: 1352
PCMEP period: 3
Versification: All poems are rhymed and make frequent use of alliteration. Their style show close affinity to Middle English romances. For more details on the metre, see Hall 1887: xviii-xx.
The table below summarizes the verse style of every poem (stanzas, rhyme, alliteration):
Poem Versification
1 Twelve stanzas, the first eleven stanzas 8-line, the twelfth stanza 4 lines; ab ab ab ab, last stanza ab ab; iambic short lines with three to four stresses and some alliteration e.g. lines 21-22
2 Six 6-line stanzas; aaaa bb (the bb lines rhyming in þe while : gile throughout); long lines of at least four stresses with heavy use of alliteration everywhere
3 Sixty-three rhyming couplets; aa; short lines of usually four stresses with little use of alliteration
4 Sixteen 6-line stanzas; couplet + enclosed rhyme, aa bccb; iambic short lines of usually four stresses with little use of alliteration
5 Sixteen stanzas of irregular length and metre; couplets, mostly aaaabb (stanzas 1, 4, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16), but also aaaa (stanzas 3, 7, 11, 12, 13), aaaaaa (stanzas 5, 6) and aaaaaabb (stanza 2); long lines of at least four stresses with heavy use of alliteration everywhere
6 Six 8-line stanzas, and three final stanzas extended to 11-lines; alternating rhyme abababab (first six stanzas), abababab cac (last three stanzas); three stresses per line, except for the first line of the last three, extended stanzas, which only have one stress, with some use of alliteration
7 Ten rhyming couplets, then nineteen 8-line stanzas; aa (lines 1-20), abab bcbc (lines 21-172); iambic short lines with four stresses and some alliteration e.g. lines 83-84
8 Twelve 8-line stanzas; abab bcbc; iambic short lines usually with four stresses and little use of alliteration
9 Eleven stanzas of irregular length and metre; six monoryhmes with a final couplet, aaaaaabb (stanzas 1, 4), four monoryhmes with a final couplet, aaaabb (stanzas 2, 3, 5, 9, 10, 11) six monorhymes, aaaaaa (stanza 6), or four monoryhmes, aaaa (stanza 7, 8); long lines of at least four stresses with heavy use of alliteration
10 Five 6-line stanzas; aaaa bb; long lines of at least four stresses with heavy use of alliteration
11 Six 6-line stanzas and one final 4-line stanza; aaaabb, last stanza aaaa; long lines of at least four stresses with heavy use of alliteration
Index of ME Verse: 3801 (Poem 1), 3080 (Poem 2), 987 (Poem 3), 709 (Poem 4), 2189 (Poem 5), 3796 (Poem 6), 2149 (Poem 7), 585 (Poem 8), 3117 (Poem 9), 1401 (Poem 10), 3899 (Poem 11) (IMEV, NIMEV)
Digital Index of ME Verse: 6067 (Poem 1), 4796 (Poem 2), 1615 (Poem 3), 1173.5 (Poem 4), 3520 (Poem 5), 6057 (Poem 6), 3467 (Poem 7), 954 (Poem 8), 4861 (Poem 9), 2334 (Poem 10), 6223 (Poem 11)
Wells: 4.12
MEC HyperBibliography: Minot Poems


About the edition and manuscript base:
Edition: Edition: Hall, Joesph. 1887. The Poems of Laurence Minot. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1-36.
Manuscript used for edition: London, British Library, Cotton Galba E.9, ff. 52r57v
Online manuscript description: Manuscript Description, British Library
Manuscript dialect: Northern
The manuscript witness shows essentially Northern features. This is true for grammatical endings, such as nominal nouns taking the third person present ending -s, þe wordes of sir Edward makes ... (Poem 5, l. 3), and for the phonology in general, such as the frequent retention of Northern a for Old English ā, rhyme care (OE caru) : mare (OE māra > Middle English mōre) (Poem 8, l. 1/3).
For more details on the Northern manuscript dialect, see Hall (1887: xiii-xvii) and Scholle (1884: vii-xxviii).
The copyist likely came from a more northern region than Minot himself. "[T]he scribe was more distinctly Northern" (Hall 1987: xviii). "[Minot]'s transcriber might be a Lincolnshire or Yorkshire man" (ibid.). "[I]t may well be that the scribe had before him a copy made by a Midland man, and not that of Minot" (ibid., see also p. 118, note on Poem 2, l. 134, for an argument for the scribe being a Lincolnshire man).
Manuscript date: s. xv-in
"The handwriting of the MS. is of the first twenty years of the fifteenth century" (Hall 1887: viii). The time of the creation of the manuscript can possibly be restricted further to c. 1403-1407 based on the implausibility of copying a positive attitude towards conspirators against Henry IV found in a poem on folios 49r-50v after that date (ibid.: ix).
For slightly different views, see the list of scholars mentioned by Hall (ibid.: viii) in footnote 1.
The online version of the Middle English Dictionary lists the manuscript date as a1425.


About the file:
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ID:
Word count: 6,664
645 (Poem1) + 324 (Poem2) + 822 (Poem 3) + 560 (Poem 4) + 782 (Poem 5) + 434 (Poem 6) + 1122 (Poem 7) + 662 (Poem 8) + 604 (Poem 9) + 303 (Poem 10) + 406 (Poem 11)
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References

Hall, Joseph. 1887. The Poems of Laurence Minot. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (available online)
Kroch, Anthony & Taylor, Ann. 1997. 'Verb Movement in Old and Middle English: Dialect Variation and Language Contact.' In: Kemenade, Ans van & Vincent, Nigel (eds.) Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 45-68.
Putter, Ad. 2009. 'The Metres and Stanza Forms of Popular Romance.' In: Radulescu , Raluca L. & Rushton, Cory J. (eds.) A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. 111-31.
Reed, Edward B. 1912. English Lyrical Poetry from its Origins to the Present Time. New Haven: Yale University Press. (available online)
Ritson, Joseph. 1795. Poems on Interesting Events in the Reign of King Edward III Written in the Year 1352. London: T. Bensley. (available online)
Scholle, Wilhelm. 1884. Laurence Minots Lieder Mit Grammatisch-Metrischer Einleitung. Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner.