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Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
Saint Eustace
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| Text name: | Saint Eustace |
| Alternative names: | Life of St Eustace; All that loveth gods lore, Old and young less and more; Seynt Ewstas |
| Content: | Introduction. The narrator seeks his audience's attention. He begins his story (ll. 1-6). Placidas' conversion. Placidas was a heathen but virtuous knight during the time of Emperor Trajan. Placidas was hunting after a hart one day when the hart suddenly started talking to him. A bright light shone upon the hart and God's voice spoke through the animal. Awestruck by this miracle, Placidas converted himself and his family to Christianity. He now called himself Eustace (ll. 7-68). The angel's prophecy. Eustace and his family rejoiced in their conversion and then rested under a linden tree. An angel appeared and promised them eternal life as a reward for a harsh earthly existence to come (ll. 69-99). Eustace's suffering. Eustace went home and found his farm animals dead – he had become a poor man. Eustace and his family had to relocate to Egypt. A boatman stole away Eustace's wife. Wild animals killed his two children at a water crossing. Eustace was heart-broken and prayed to God. An angel appeared and reassured him again of eternal life in heaven. Eustace became a laborer in a town, unbefitting of his class. He lived there for fifteen years (ll. 100-218). Eustace's rank restored. The emperor searched for Placidas. Three knights arrived and recognized him. They brought him back to the emperor. The emperor and his court were delighted to see him again (ll. 219-270). Eustace's family restored. Suddenly, a war broke out and many knights went off into battle After the battle, two knights talked about their adventures and discovered that they were actually brothers, Eustace's sons, both having survived their animal attacks. By accident, their mother overheard their conversation in an orchard. Then, Eustace arrived, and thus the whole family was reunited. They were overjoyed (ll. 271-402). Death and ascent into heaven. The emperor learned that Eustace and his family were Christian. He put the family into a prison with wild animals, which miraculously did not harm them. The emperor then had the whole family burnt. Their souls went into heaven (ll. 403-420). End. The narrator implores his audience to pray to Saint Eustace so that they might live in heaven. |
| Genre/subjects: | saint's life, saint's legend, religious tale, legend, hagiography, homily, vie |
| Dialect of original composition: | Unknown, perhaps East-Midlands The dialect of the original has not been discussed in detail. A northern dialect is unlikely because of verb placement facts, as described in Kroch and Taylor (1997): The finite verb is always placed after a fronted constituent and a subject pronoun. It is possible that the original was composed in an East Midlands dialect (rather than the (South) West Midlands manuscript dialect). That is suggested by rhyme evidence as an indication of the original language: (1) Old English /ēo/ has rounded Southwestern reflexes, written as eo, oe, o, u, etc. whereas the East Midlands tend to have e. The text includes rhymes based on Old English /ēo/ and Old English /ē/. Such Middle English vowel pairs could originate in the East Midlands as e : e, but hardly in the West Midlands, where they would surface as oe : e etc.: ise : þe (ll. 39, 42, Old English gesēon 'see,' þē 'thee'), depe : wepe (ll. 322, 323, Old English dēop 'deep,' wēpan 'weep'). (2) There is also a spoiled rhyme, blisse : cusse (ll. 399, 402 'bliss', 'kiss'). This presupposes an original rhyme, blisse : kisse. Such a rhyme could originate in the East Midlands, where Old English /y/ (cyssan) develops into i (hence kisse). The manuscript form, on the other hand, can be explained as an innovation by a scribe from the West Midlands, where Old English /y/ (cyssan) regularly develops into a u-form (hence cusse) (Brandl 1881: 398). Some scholars have claimed that the author came from the "Midlands" (Shuffelton 2008, Brandl 1881), by which perhaps they mean East Midlands. |
| Date of original composition: | 1240-1290 The late thirteenth century date of the manuscript functions as the terminus ante quem for the composition of the poem. However, the original must be older than the manuscript as shown by modifications (e.g., spoiled rhymes, such as be : hoe (ll. 58:59), probably explainable as introductions by a scribe from the (South) West Midlands). The original may have been composed in the second half of the thirteenth century (Shuffelton 2008) or "towards the end of the thirteenth century" (Purdi 2002: 118). |
| Suggested date: | 1255 |
| PCMEP period: | 2a (1250-1300) |
| Versification: | Seventy-one 6-line stanzas; in tail rhyme, aabccb (Wells 1916: 310); the a and c rhymes with four, the embracing b rhymes with three, metrical stresses (Purdie 2008: 42) |
| Index of ME Verse: | 211 (IMEV), 211 (NIMEV) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 374 |
| Wells: | 5.42 |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | St. Eust. |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | Horstmann, Carl. 1881. Altenglische Legenden: Mit Einleitung und Anmerkungen. Heilbronn: Gebrüder Henninger. 211-219. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 86 (SC 1687), ff. 122v-125v |
| Online manuscript description: | LAEME Manuscripts of the West Midlands (item 40) Summary catalogue of Western manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, no. 1687 |
| Manuscript dialect: | West-Midlands The manuscript language has been localized to Gloucestershire or Worcestershire (McIntosh et al. 1986: 197). Support for the view that the manuscript is from the West-Midlands is also provided by external evidence surrounding a kalendar of saints from the diocese of Worcester, the occurrence of the place names Ridmerley and Pendock, and references to three Worcestershire families (Brown 1932, Miller 1963, Tschann and Parkes 1996, Laing 2000). LAEME localizes the manuscript more specifically to "Redmarley D’Abitot, N[orth]W[est] Glouc[ester]s[hire]" (LAEME item 2002). Previous scholarship often identified the manuscript language as broadly Southern (probably signifying any non-Northern dialect) (Horstmann 1881: 211, Brandl 1881: 398, Kennedy 1915: 14, Wells 1916: 310). |
| Manuscript date: | s. xiii-ex The manuscript has been dated to 1272–1282 based on a list of kings on f. 205v ending with Edward I, who ruled from 1272, and the Roman numeral .x., interpeted as the tenth year of his reign, 1282 (Tschann & Parkes 1996: xxxvi–xxxvii). The online version of the Middle English Dictionary lists the manuscript date as "?a1300." With respect to the text St. Eustace specifically, scholars have suggested manuscript dates such as "c. 1290" (Horstmann 1881: 211), the "late thirteenth-century" (Shuffleton 2008) or "the last quarter of the thirteenth or possible the earliest years of the fourteenth century" (Purdi 2002: 118). |
About the file:
| File name: | M2a.StEustace |
| ID: | StEustace,x.y.z: x=page, y=line, z=token |
| Word count: | 2320 |
| Token count: | 258 |
| Line count: | 426 |
Other:
| General notes: | The poem Saint Eustace is also included in the P-LAEME corpus. Researchers using both the PCMEP and P-LAEME should choose one or the other file. There is a second witness of the poem, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole 61. It was copied in the late fifteenth century. The poem is one of the oldest Middle English legends. It is not generally regarded as a text of high literary quality. Some transitions are very abrupt, sometimes to the point of distorting the sense (Shuffelton 2008, Horstmann 1881: 211). Other versions dealing with Saint Eustace are found in the South English Legendary, the Northern Homily Collection, the Scottish Collection, the 1438 and Caxton's translation of the Golden Legend and a late rendition from 1566. The theme of God's harsh testing of faith, however, appear more widely in folklore or the Bible (e.g. the Book of Job) (Horstmann 1881: 211, Wells 1916: 310, Shuffelton 2008). |
| Remarks on parses: | The line breaks in the electronic text file follow Horstmann's edition (1881: 211-9). The parses are largely unproblematic. |
References
Brandl, Alois. 1881. 'Review of Horstmann C. 'Altenglische Legenden' und 'Barbour's Legendensammlung'.' Literaturblatt für Germanische und Romanische Philologie 11. 397-400. (available online)
Brown, Carleton F. 1932. English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century. Oxford: Clarendon.
Horstmann, Carl. 1881. Altenglische Legenden: Mit Einleitung und Anmerkungen. Heilbronn: Gebrüder Henninger. (available online)
Kennedy, Arthur G. 1915. The Pronoun of Address in English Literature of the Thirteenth Century. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
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.
Laing, Margaret. 2000. 'The Linguistic Stratification of the Middle English Texts in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86. ' Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 101. 523–569.
McIntosh, Angus, Samuels, Michael L. & Benskin, Michael. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
Miller, Brian D. H. 1963. 'The Early History of Bodleian Ms. Digby 86.' Annuale medievale 4. 26-56.
Purdie, Rhiannon. 2002. 'Generic Identity and the Origins of Sir Isumbras.' In: Hardman, Phillipa (ed.) The Matter of Identity in Medieval Romance. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. 113-124.
Purdie, Rhiannon. 2008. Anglicising Romance: Tail-rhyme and Genre in Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.
Shuffelton, George. 2008. Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications. (available online)
Tschann, Judith & Parkes, Malcolm. 1996. Facsimile of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86. EETS s.s.16. Oxford: Oxford 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)