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Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
Sir Cleges
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About the text:
About the edition and manuscript base:
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| Text name: | Sir Cleges |
| Alternative names: | Listen lordings and ye shall hear |
| Content: | Sir Cleges, a knight of Uther Pendragon, and his wife throw lavish Christmas feasts and freely give away alms and gifts. Their wealth begins to deplete and eventually they are reduced
to poverty. One Christmas Day, after praying in his garden, Sir Cleges is amazed to discover cherries growing on a tree above him in the middle of winter. By advice of his wife, he walks to
Court, hoping for gifts in return for the cherries from the king. On his way, he encounters a porter, an usher, and the steward, who each refuse to admit him to the king unless they receive a third of the king's reward. Sir Cleges agrees to their demands. The King is impressed by the miraculous cherries
and offers Sir Cleges anything that he asks. Refusing land and money, Sir Cleges requests the right to administer twelve blows with his staff. The king reluctantly agrees, and Cleges gives each of the three evil servants four severe blows. A harper identifies Sir Cleges, and the king is overjoyed,
having assumed that Cleges was dead. When the reason for his strange request is revealed, the king and
his court are delighted. The king gives Cardiff Castle and other goods to Cleges, makes him his steward
and his son a squire. Cleges pays off his debts and rules wisely and prosperously until his death. The romance is an interesting combination of a pious tale, focusing on a saint-like hero who embodies the virtue of generosity, and a humerous tale, with a comical punchline. The poem includes the "Rash Boon" trope, a common motif in medieval literature, in which a character asks a favor without specifying what it will be, the grantor agrees, also without inquiring what the favor will be, and the favor then turns out to place the grantor in a difficult (or at least undesirable) position. |
| Genre/subjects: | romance, tale, didactic legend, saint's legend, exile, friendship, mistaken identity, supernatural, boon, morals, gift, punishment |
| Dialect of original composition: | Northern "Place of Composition: North Midlands" (Database of Middle English Romances) The poem "originated in the North Midland" (Wells 1916: 161). Treichel places the original work in the northern part of the Midlands of England on the basis of rhyme evidence (1896: 371-4). |
| Date of original composition: | 1380-1410 "[T]he unknown author [...] may have written the text in the late fourteenth century" (Shuffelton 2008: Introduction to Sir Cleges). "Date of Composition: Late fourteenth century" (Database of Middle English Romances) The online version of the Middle English Dictionary dates the original composition of the poem in manuscript Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates 19.1.11 as a1400 "originated [...] at the beginning of the fifteenth century" (Wells 1916: 161) "The time of composition was not far from that of the Canterbury Tales" (McKnight 1913: lxi-lxii). According to Treichel, certain rhymes show that the poem cannot originate from earlier than the beginning of the fifteenth century (1896: 374). |
| Suggested date: | 1395 |
| PCMEP period: | 3 (1350-1420) |
| Versification: | 12-line tail-rime stanzas, aabccbddbeeb |
| Index of ME Verse: | 1890 (IMEV), 1890 (NIMEV) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 3093 |
| Wells: | 1.112 |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | Cleges |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | McKnight, George H. 1913. Middle English Humorous Tales in Verse. Boston and London: Heath. 38-59. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole 61 (SC 6922*), ff. 67v-73r |
| Online manuscript description: | eLALME Summary catalogue of Western manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, no. 6922 |
| Manuscript dialect: | (North) East-Midlands The Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English localizes the dialect of the scribe in northeast Leicestershire (McIntosh et al. 1986: 233-4). The scribe's dialectal features include the form thei, they for the third person plural pronoun, plural endings in –(y)s, or the spelling of "but" as bot. |
| Manuscript date: | s. xv-in The online version of the Middle English Dictionary dates the manuscript c1500. "[T]he manuscript dates from either the last decade of the fifteenth century or the first decade of the sixteenth; no date more precise than 'c. 1500' can be assigned with any confidence" (Shuffelton 2008: introduction). |
About the file:
| File name: | M3.SirCleges |
| ID: | SirCleges,x.y.z: x=page, y=line, z=token |
| Word count: | 3,384 |
| Token count: | 312 |
| Line count: | 577 |
Other:
| General notes: | The text in McKnight's edition shows an interesting mix between thorn and th and between yogh and y. This may
indicate the transitional nature of spelling conventions at the close of the 14th century. The poem survives in two manuscripts, Ashmole 61 (570 lines), and Edinburgh Advocates 19.1.11 (531 lines). The latter witness is headed by a drawing of a minstrel singing to King Uther. Treichel (1896) prints both versions in parallel. |
| Remarks on parses: | The line breaks in the electronic file follow the regular meter of the poem as indicated in McKnight's 1913 edition. The parses are generally unproblematic. |
References
McIntosh, Angus, Samuels, Michael L. & Benskin, Michael. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
McKnight, George H. 1913. Middle English Humorous Tales in Verse. Boston and London: Heath. (available online)
Shuffelton, George. 2008. Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications. (available online)
Treichel, Adolf. 1896. 'Sir Cleges: Eine mittelenglische Romanze.' Englische Studien 22. 345-89.
Wells, John E. 1916. Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400. New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. (available online)