The Parsed Corpus of
Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
A Lutel Soth Sermun
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About the text:
About the edition and manuscript base:
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Other:
| Text name: | A Lutel Soth Sermun |
| Alternative names: | A little true Sermon, Harkeneth all good men and still sitteth a-down |
| Content: | This poem is a short, rhymed sermon. It reproaches criminals, who will all go to hell, cheating bakers and butchers, priest's wives and the selfish youth. |
| Genre/subjects: | sermon, religious instructions, religious treatise, spiritual advice |
| Dialect of original composition: | Unknown The dialect of the original has not been discussed in considerable detail. Wells (1916: 274) asserts that the poem stems from the "South Midland." A northern dialect of composition can likely be ruled out on the basis of verb placement facts, as described in Kroch & Taylor (1997). The (non-negated) finite verb is always placed after a fronted constituent and a subject pronoun, resulting in the pattern 'X-pronoun-verb.' This pattern is typical of more southern texts. "Low they hold their gallon (=they sell a gallon for less than it is)" (line 37) |
| Date of original composition: | 1200-1275 Wells assumed that the poem originates from "not later than 1230" (Wells 1916: 274). However, his date of composition was based at least in part on the assumption that the poem's second manuscript source, Cotton MS. Caligula A.9, dates from c. 1250. It is now dated later (Ker 1963). The date of composition may thus be a couple of decades later than Wells had assumed as well, say 1250. A date of composition of around 1250 may also be supported by the fact that there are very few non-orthographic differences between the two manuscript witnesses, Jesus College 29 and Caligula A.9, and that there are no spoiled rhymes, which suggests that the copies are only a few removes, if any, from the original. A date much later than 1250 may not be plausible as shown by conservative features, such as the object determiners þan, þen (e.g. l. 13), verbal plural agreement in -eþ (though -e also appears) (e.g. l. 30) or frequent subject-verb inversion after negative ne (e.g. l. 44). Linking the mention of a contemporary simony in the poem Hwon holy chireche is vnder uote (in Jesus College 29, ll. 29-33) to attested events in church history, Morris (1872: xi) argues that "the poems in the Cotton and Jesus MSS. were composed before 1250, and probably soon after the year 1244." |
| Suggested date: | 1245 |
| PCMEP period: | 1b (1200-1250) |
| Versification: | two-line, aa; septenars However, Morris' (1872) edition arranges the lines in such a way that between lines 1-16 and 25-end only every second line forms a proper rhyme (abcb). Lines 58-60 (come:luue) do not seem to rhyme at all. |
| Index of ME Verse: | 1091 (IMEV), 1091 (NIMEV) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 1773 |
| Wells: | 5.3 |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | LSSerm. |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | Morris, Richard. 1872. An Old English Miscelany. EETS o.s. 49. London: Trübner & Co. 186-91. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | Oxford, Jesus College 29, Part II, f. 185r-185v |
| Online manuscript description: | LAEME Manuscripts of the West Midlands (item 15) |
| Manuscript dialect: | West-Midlands The scribal dialect has been localized to Herefordshire (McIntosh et al. 1986: 199). |
| Manuscript date: | s. xiii-ex The manuscript was made in the late thirteenth century (Ker 1963: ix, xvi). |
About the file:
| File name: | M1b.LittleSerm |
| ID: | LittleSerm,x.y.z: x=page, y=line, z=token |
| Word count: | 438 |
| Token count: | 41 |
| Line count: | 100 |
Other:
| General notes: | Number [25] in Morris' (1872) edition. Morris prints the Ms. Jesus College 29 version, which is used for the parse, and the second witness of the piece, Ms. Cotton Caligula A.9, side by side. The two manuscripts share a number of texts together. The parsed text can be found on pages 187, 189 and 191. The text is quite prosaic. In fact, Wells claims that "[t]he piece is not poetry." (1916: 274). There may be relatively little poetic licensing distorting the syntax. |
| Remarks on parses: | The line count follows Morris (1872: 187, 189, 191) edition. The parses are largely unproblematic. |
References
Ker, Neil R. 1963. The Owl and the Nightingale: Facsimile of the Jesus and Cotton Manuscripts. EETS o.s. 251. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McIntosh, Angus, Samuels, Michael L. & Benskin, Michael. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
Morris, Richard. 1872. An Old English Miscellany. EETS o.s. 49. London: Trübner & Co. (available online)
Wells, John E. 1916. Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400. New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. (available online)