The Parsed Corpus of
Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
A Prisoner's Prayer
Back to PCMEP texts
About the text:
About the edition and manuscript base:
About the file:
Other:
| Text name: | A Prisoner's Prayer |
| Alternative names: | Ar ne kuthe ich sorghe non / nu ich mot manen min mon; Ere ne couth I sorrow none; Prisoner's Lament; Prisoner's Song; Previously I knew no care |
| Content: | The speaker laments his lot in life. Formerly, he knew no sorrow (stanza 1). Now he and his companions are innocently imprisoned (stanza 2). May God free them (stanza 3). Nobody should trust in the vicissitude of the world (stanza 4). May Mary beseech her son to bring them to the eternal bliss of heaven (stanza 5). |
| Genre/subjects: | lament, imprisonment, prison, lyric, song, transitoriness of life, planctus, contrition, supplication, prayer to Virgin Mary |
| Dialect of original composition: | East Midlands, London Several scholars have connected the text with London, describing it as "a typical London trilingual text" (Hanna 2005: 67), "one of the first extant texts in London English" (Ackroyd 2001: 69), a "represent[ation of] the London speech" (Kington-Oliphant 1873: 136), and as "[]consistent with an origin in London" (Dobson & Harrison 1979: 112). The text is listed under "East Midlands" in Watson (1974: 86). However, the actual evidence in support of this view has not been discussed in great detail and seems to be largely based on the manuscript provenance. |
| Date of original composition: | 1200-1250 There is some scholarly consensus that the text originates from the early to mid-thirteenth century. It was "written in the middle of the thirteenth century" (Ackroyd 2001: 69). "[T]he song [...] must be dated to a time before 1250, possible c. 1225" [translated from German original] (Reichl 2005: 59). The poem is from "about A.D. 1240" (Kington-Oliphant 1873: 136). |
| Suggested date: | 1230 |
| PCMEP period: | 1b (1200-1250) |
| Versification: | Five stanzas with different metre and rhymes: (1) first stanza six-line, aabccb, with four trochaic stresses, (2) second stanza eight-line, ababcdcd, with three to five stresses and varying prosodic feet, (3) third stanza in twelve short lines, aabccbddeffe, of varying length of one to three stresses, (4) fourth stanza eight-line, aaacdddc, with three stresses and varying prosodic feet, (5) fifth stanza eight-line, aabccccb, with four stresses but third and eighth line three stresses, in varying prosodic feet though mostly trochees. The whole text was "probably originally tail-rime" (Wells 1916 : 501). The text is set to music. For a discussion of the musical notation and its influence on the versification, see Page (1976: 64-5), Dobson & Harrison (1979: 110-6). |
| Index of ME Verse: | 322 (IMEV), 322 (NIMEV) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 1201 (0.322) |
| Wells: | 13.30 |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | Ar ne kuthe |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | Brown, Carleton F. 1932. English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century. Oxford: Clarendon. 10-13. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | London, Metropolitan Archives, COL/CS/01/001/001 [Liber de Antiquis Legibus], f. 160v-161v (Metropolitan Archives reference code for this item: COL/AC/19/041) (formerly: London, National Archives, Corporation of London Records Office, Cust. 1) (formerly: London, Guildhall Library, Record Room of the Town Clerk's Office) |
| Online manuscript description: | Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) London Metropolitan Archives, Collections Catalogue LAEME The Andrew W.Mellon Foundation, Oxford University |
| Manuscript dialect: | East-Midlands, London The two leaves on which the text is found are additions to the manuscript. They may originally have been fragments of a service book that belonged to the scribe of the main part of the manuscript, Arnald Thedmar, Alderman of London (1201-74) (for some historical background on Arnald Thedmar, see e.g. Stone 2015). The handwriting of the added leaves "corresponds with that in the best and oldest writing in the book" (Ellis 1869: 429, fn. 3). Hence, the handwriting of the inserted pages of the Prisoner's Prayer and the main part of the manuscript seem to be comparable. Based on these historical connections, the manuscript witness of the Prisoner’s Prayer is usually assumed to be from London (Ker 1969: 22). LAEME localizes the manuscript to the "City of London" (LAEME item 138). On the other hand, Ellis (1868) lists orthographic mistakes such as sholye for tholye and speculates that these "errors may arise from the scribe not being used to write English" or even "that the scribe was a Norman" (ibid.: 99). While the hypothesis of the incompetent Norman scribe is no longer considered valid (e.g. Laing 1999), the scribal errors may show that the London scribal dialect of the main manuscript and the scribal dialect of the inserted pages of the Prisoner's Prayer are not actually comparable. |
| Manuscript date: | s. xiii-mid, s. xiii-ex There is strong consensus that the main manuscript was completed by 1274 because the Latin chronicle it contains has this year as its last entry. The leaves of the Prisoner’s Prayer may thus have been copied and added at some point before that date. The manuscript is "probably earlier than 1274" (Ellis 1868: 98), "circà A.D. 1270" (Ellis 1869: 428), "of about 1270" (Wells 1916: 501), "dates from about 1270" (Trend 1928: 113), "c1270" (Page 1976), from "? mid-xiii cent." (Stevens 1994: 9). LAEME assigns the date "C13a2". |
About the file:
| File name: | M1b.PrisPrayer |
| ID: | PrisPrayer,x.y.z: x=token, y=page number, z=line |
| Word count: | 212 |
| Token count: | 19 |
| Line count: | 44 |
Other:
| General notes: | The Prisoner's Prayer is set to music and co-occurs with an Anglo-Norman analogue. The Anglo-Norman version is the original from which the English is translated as evidenced by the fact that the music is adapted specifically to the French rather than the English text (e.g., Ellis 1868: 99, Wells 1916: 501). The Anglo-Norman text is found immediately below the musical notes, the English text placed parallel under it (e.g., Brown 1932: 168). The Anglo-Norman and English versions are so-called contrafacta of the Latin lament Planctus ante nescia by Godefroy of St. Victor, i.e., they use the same melody but not the same textual content. The Anglo-Norman and French in turn are relatively close paraphrases of each other. The manuscript to which the Prisoner's Prayer has been appended is the so-called "Liber de Antiquis Legibus." It contains "historical material mainly by and in the hand of Arnald Thedmar, alderman of the City of London, d 1274(?)" (Ker 1969: 22). The full title inscribed in the volume is "De Antiquis Legibus Liber Cronica Maiorum et Vice Comitum Lononiarum et quedam que contingebant temporibus illis ab anno MCLXXVII [1177] ad annum MCCLXXIV [1274]" (Brown 1932: 167). Despite its brevity, the Prisoner's Prayer has attracted a lot of scholarly attention. - The piece has frequently been edited, e.g., Ellis (1868), Brown (1932), Aspin (1953) and Dobson and Harrison (1979). For a comprehensive list of modern editions, see the Index of Middle English Verse. - A modernized version of the musical notation is offered in Ellis (1869), Gennrich (1929), or Dobson & Harrison (1979). |
| Remarks on parses: | Brown's (1932: 10-13) prints every stanza preceded by a French stanza, the Anglo-Norman source for the English text. The parsed file does not contain the French material. As part of his discussion on the language of the text, Ellis (1868: 99-102) presents several supposed scribal errors which one might want to take into consideration for parsing (e.g., "the writer evidently forgot an and at the beginning of v. 14, which is wanted for grammatical construction, metre and music" (ibid.: 100). However, none of his suggestions have been incorporated into the parsed file. Ellis points out an early occurrence of who as a relative pronoun in and hus tache werchen swo // in thos liue go wu sit go (ll. 41-2): "The use of wo or wu as the pure relative referring to hus in the line before, is the earliest example of this use, being fully a century prior to the Wicliffite versions, which contained the earliest instance formerly known" (1868: 100). However, Ellis makes several interpretative assumptions to arrive at this conclusion, suggesting that "the first go seems to be an error" (ibid.), believing wu "to stand for wo in" (ibid.) and hypothesizes that sit "is apparently the Old Norse sút ['grief, pain, sorrow']", so that he reads, 'and teach us to work thus // who, in this life, go in pain.' This is not the preferred reading in most editions; it is not the reading used for the parsed file; and the lines should not count as evidence for an early instance of relative who. Rather, wu sit is regarded as a contracted form of hou-so it ... 'howsoever it ...' (MED entry for hou-so), so that the passage can be understood smoothly as 'and teach us to work thus // in this life – [may it] go howsoever it may go.' The annotation in the parsed file implements this reading. The line breaks follow the metre as in Brown's (1932: 10-13) edition. The parses are generally unproblematic. Some difficult words and interpretations are explained as CODE comments in the parsed file. |
References
Ackroyd, Peter. 2001. London: The Biography. London: Vintage.
Aspin, Isabel S. T. 1953. Anglo-Norman Political Songs. Anglo-Norman Text Society 11. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dobson, Eric J. & Harrison, Frank L. 1979. Medieval English Songs. London: Faber and Faber.
Ellis, Alexander J. 1868. The Only English Proclamation of Henry III., 18 October 1258, and its Treatment by Former Editors and Translators, Considered and Illustrated; to which are Added Editions of The Cuckoo Song and The Prisoner's Prayer, Lyrics of the XIIIth Century. London: Asher & Co. (available online)
Ellis, Alexander J. 1869. On Early English Pronunciation, with Special Reference to Shakespeare and Chaucer. Volume 2. London: Asher & Co. (available online)
Gennrich, Friedrich. 1929. 'Internationale Mittelalterliche Melodien.' Zeitschrift für Musik-Wissenschaft 11.5, 11.6. 259-296, 321-348.
Hanna, Ralph. 2005. London Literature 1300-1380. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ker, Neil R. 1969. Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries. Volume 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kington-Oliphant, Thomas L. 1873. The Sources of Standard English. London: MacMillan & Co. (available online)
Laing, Margaret. 1999. 'Confusion "wrs" Confounded: Litteral Substitution Sets in Early Middle English Writing Systems.' Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100.3. 251-270.
Page, Christopher. 1976. 'A Catalogue and Bibliography of English Song from Its Beginnings to c1300.' R.M.A. Research Chronicle 13. 67-83. (available online)
Reichl, Karl. 2005. Die Anfänge der Mittelenglischen Weltlichen Lyrik: Text, Musik, Kontext. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh.
Stevens, John. 1994. 'Alphabetical Check-list of Anglo-Norman Songs c. 1150—c. 1350.' Plainsong and Medieval Music. 3.1. 1-22.
Stone, Ian. 2015. ' Arnold Fitz Thedmar: Identity, Politics and the City of London in the Thirteenth Century.' London Journal 40.2. 106-122.
Trend, John B. 1928. 'The First English Songs.' Music and Letters 9.2. 111-128.
Watson, George. 1974. The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. Volume 1: 600-1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wells, John E. 1916. Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400. New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. (available online)