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Four middle EnglishpassagesBengt LindströmPublished online: 21 Jul 2008.

To cite this article: Bengt Lindström (1974) Four middle English passages,Studia Neophilologica, 46:1, 151-158, DOI: 10.1080/00393277408587580

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Four Middle English Passages

i

On pp. 222 ff. of Fernand Mossé's Handbook1 is printed an extract fromDan Michel of Northgate's Ayenbite of Imoyt (A.D. 1340). On p. 223 weread: 'pet is be vissere of helle bet nymp bane viss bi be brote and by bechinne.' In his introduction to the piece Mossé says that 'the translation[is] bad and full of errors', and in his notes he points out one or twofaulty renderings, but he does not comment on the sentence just quoted.Dan Michel's French source, the Somme des Vices et des Vertues byFriar Lorens of Orléans, which Mossé obligingly prints at the bottomof the page, states, however, that the Fisherman of Hell catches the fishby the mouth with a hook: 'C'est li peeschierres d'enfer qui prent lespoissons par la goule a le emeçon.'

This mistake in the English, together with a host of others, waspointed out by Hermann Varnhagen almost a century ago: 'Die entdek-kung, dass die fische ein "kinn" haben, verdanken wir Michel... Letztereswort [seil, emeçon] hat Michel mit menton verwechselt.'2

Now, I do not think it is fair to impute all the corrupt readings inthe Ayenbite to Michel; some are no doubt reflexes of vitiated readingsin the French from which he translated. It is true that Varnhagen (andhis pupil Evers) would have us believe that Michel was composing withBrit. Mus. MS Cotton Cleopatra A 5 in front of him, which reads a leemeçon, but this has not been conclusively proved.3 I think that thereexisted a group of manuscripts that actually read par la goule e le menton;only thus can we explain the recurrence of practically the same mistakein a later (independent) translation of the Somme (c. 1410) included in

1 A Handbook of Middle English, transl. J. A. Walker (Baltimore, 1952). Inthe original French edition, Manuel de l'anglais du moyen âge, II (Paris, 1949),the extract is found on pp. 255 ff.

2 'Beiträge zur Erklärung und Textkritik von Dan Michel's Ayenbite of Inwyt',Englische Studien, I (1877), 379 ff. The quotation is found on pp. 415-16.

3 Cf. J. K. Wallenberg, The Vocabulary of Dan Michel's Ayenbite of Inwyt(Uppsala, 1923), p. xiii.

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153 BENGT LINDSTRÖM

Brit. Mus. Additional MS 17013: 'bis is be fischere of helle bat fischeband takeb be fesch bi be moub and bi be brote.'1 It is not very likelythat two translators should have committed the error of confusingemeçon and menton.

How the reading e le menton for a le emeçon arose we cannot know;here we are perforce in the realm of speculation. I shall offer one possi-bility out of many, however, and take as my point of departure the spellinglemecon (with the vowel of the article elided), which is bound to haveoccurred in some texts. Copying this, some scribe may have mistakenthe c for a t, combined the first e with the / by false division and supplieda supposedly missing linea nasalis above the second e; thus: le mëton.None of these changes need surprise us; c and t are virtually indistinguish-able in most medieval hands,2 the separation of words continued to beerratic throughout the Middle Ages, and abbreviation marks werecertainly liable to be omitted. One change seems to have been deliberate,though: the substitution of the conjunction e for the preposition a.3

II

Mis-division is not a very common cause of corruption in texts, but,in another medieval English translation from French, I have come acrossa faulty reading which is indubitably due to corruption by wrong divisionin the translator's exemplar. In the late fifteenth-century translation ofthe apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus that is contained in Brit. Mus. MSHarley 149,4 we read on fol. 271*: 'For .. . he schuld destroye the brasyn3atys, and the closures of helle he schuld breke, and delyuer hem fromthe way of her ffellonye.' This renders Psalm cvi. 16-17 (according tothe Versio gallicand):

1 Also printed together with Dan Michel's text in the Handbook (but notin the Manuel). Yet another text brought in for comparison in the Handbook,Caxton's Ryall Book, has the more or less correct translation: ' . . . taketh the fyssheswyth the grynnes [i.e. 'snares'] by the throte.'

2 Where the cedilla is used to show 'soft' c, it is editorial.3 Mistakes by false division are apt to cause further corruption. Cf. the follow-

ing Latin examples—all quoted from James Willis, Latin Textual Criticism(Univ. of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1972), p. 87: Ovid, Am. 2.12,3 ianua firma,tot hostes/ianua firmat ut hostis; Cicero, Farn. 1.19,3 pugnare licuisset/pugnareliquisset; Macrob. Sat. 1.21,21 velut imago/veluti magno.

4 Not edited. For information on this text, see W. H. Hulme (ed.), The MiddleEnglish Harrowing of Hell and Gospel of Nicodemus, EETS, ES, 100 (London,1907), pp. xxxiii and xlvi ff.

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FOUR MIDDLE ENGLISH PASSAGES 153

. . . quia contrivit portas aereaset vectes ferreos confregitsuscepit eos de via iniquitatis eorum.1

Now, closures of helle cannot very well be derived from vectes ferreos'iron bars', unless it be a very free paraphrase. As a matter of fact, theHarley 149 Gospel is (partly) based on an Old French redaction ofNicodemus that has come down to us in MSS Egerton 2710 and Harley2253 of the British Museum and in MSS fr. 6260 and 19525 of the Biblio-thèque Nationale. Of these Egerton 2710 and Bibl. Nat. fr. 19525 areof the thirteenth century, Harley 2253 is of the early fourteenth century,and Bibl. Nat. fr. 6260 of the fifteenth century.2 The last one I havenot seen. Of the other three, Harley 2253 translates vectes ferreos bycloistres de fer. Except for cloistres, which should be clostures, this is thetrue reading. It will readily be seen that clostures defer demands but theslightest of changes—a re-division of the sequence defer plus the intro-duction of a nasal—to become clostures d'enfer(n), the reading actuallyfound in Egerton 2710 and Bibl. Nat. fr. 19525 and reflected in theclosures of kelle of Harley 149. I quote the whole sentence as it stands inthe Egerton MS, fol. I3i r (col. 1): 'Kar il destruit les portes d'areim, eles clostures d'enfer depeçça, e sis delivera de la veie de lur felunie.'The many verbal coincidences between the English and the Frenchshould be noted.

I l l

Stanza 116 of the poetical Gospel of Nicodemus in Brit. Mus. MSHarley 4196 (first half of the fifteenth century) runs:

A voyce spak f>an full hydusly,Als it war thonours blast:

'vndo yhour yhates bilyue, byd I,bai may no langer last,

be kyng of blys comes in yhow by.'ban hell a voyce vpkast:

1 Quoted from Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem, I, ed. Robert Weber(Stuttgart, 1969), p. 908. C. Tischendorf (ed.), Evangelia apocrypha (Leipzig,1876), pp. 397-98, has 'qui contrivit portas aereas'. This is probably a misprint,but M. R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford, 1966 [1924]), p.133, translates accordingly: 'who hath broken the gates of brass . . .? '

2 The dates are those given by H. Shields, 'An Old French Book of Legendsand Its Apocalyptic Background' (unpubl. Dublin diss., 1966), p. 83.

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154 BENGT LINDSTRÖM

'what es he J>at J>ai say in hy?He sail be sett full fast.'

pan said Dauid: 'yhe ne wateHow pat I said !>us ryght,

"He es lord of gret state,In batayle mykell of myght." 'l

The source is the Descensus ad bíferos, the second part of the Evange-lium Nicodemi. In this there is an altercation between Satan and Inferusabout the advisability of bringing Christ into hell, Satan arguing for andInferus against his admission. After Christ has demanded admissiontwice in a thundering voice, Inferus, pretending to be ignorant, askswho this self-styled King of glory might be. King David, who is inLimbo together with the other Old Testament patriarchs and prophets,answers that it is 'the Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty inbattle'. The relevant passage in the Descensus reads as follows:

Et facta est vox magna ut tonitruum dicens: Tollite portas principesvestras, et elevamini portae infernales, et introibit rex gloriae. Vidensinferus quia duabus vicibus haec clamaverunt, quasi ignorans dicit: Quisest rex gloriae? Respondens David ad inferum ait: Ista verba clamoriscognosco, quoniam ego eadem per spiritum eius vaticinatus sum. Et nuncquae supra dixi dico tibi: Dominus fortis et potens, dominus potens inpraelio, ipse est rex gloriae.2

In the poetical Gospel the enigmatic Inferus has been replaced by'other devils', and whenever the word 'hell' is used the reference is tothe abode of the damned or to Limbo, the dwelling-place of the justwho died before the Incarnation, and never to a character. Lines spokenby Inferus in the Latin original have mostly been allocated to these'other devils', not infrequently referred to as 'they'.

The seventh line of the stanza—what es he pat pat say in hy?—isproblematic. Since there are no notes on the text, we can only guessat the Editor's interpretation from his punctuation. As it stands, with aquestion-mark at the end, the line is incomprehensible to me, butsome sort of meaning could be wrested from it by re-punctuating itthus: 'what es he, pat? bai say in hy.' This can be paraphrased: ' " What

1 Hulme, op. cit., p. 110. The Cotton MS Galba E IX has the same textwith only minor orthographical variations.

2 Tischendorf, op. cit., p. 398.

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FOUR MIDDLE ENGLISH PASSAGES 155

man is that?" they say at once.' The personal pronoun is duplicated bythe demonstrative pat and in hy is merely a metrical filler and rhyme tag.

The formula in hy{e) is common at the end of a line in Middle Englishverse (see MED, s.v. hi(e), n. (2)), and, previous to this occurrence,it is found at least twice in the poetical Gospel, viz. in stanzas 51 and 88:

pase knyghtes kene layd hand him onAnd led whare he suld dy,

His clothes pai dof, on him pai donA whyte towayle in hy .. ,1

He bad me pan ryse vp in hyAnd toke me bi pe hand .. .2

Duplication of he or she by this is not uncommon in Middle Englishwritings and the construction has been briefly noticed in the well-known historical grammars of Einenkel, Mustanoja, and Visser.3 Dupli-cation by that, on the other hand, is exceedingly rare (Visser has oneinstance, the others have none), and the reason for this is not far toseek: the use of he that in the sense of 'that man' was narrowly circum-scribed by the identity with he that meaning 'anyone who'. Yet, theproposed interpretation is borne out, I think, first and foremost by thecorresponding lines in another redaction of the poem, which has beenhanded down to us in Brit. Mus. Additional MS 32578:

'What is pat kynge?' alle gan pai crye,'Here he sail be sette full fast.'4

What is pat kynge corresponds to what es he pat, and alle gan pai cryeto pai say in hy. The Harley reading, being the lectio difficilior, is prob-ably the orginal one and the reading of the Additional MS an 'improve-ment' or modernization.

Further support to the proposed interpretation is lent by the para-phrase of the Descensus in the Cursor Mundi, where the constructionhe that 'that man' is used at exactly the same place as in Harley 4196.It will be noticed that the Cursor is much closer to the Latin than is thepoetical Gospel:

1 Hulme, op. cit., p. 60.2 Ibid., p. 88.3 E. Einenkel, Geschichte der englischen Sprache, II: Historische Grammatik

(Strassburg, 1916), p. 137; T. F. Mustanoja, A Middle English Syntax, I (Helsinki,1960), 137; F. Th. Visser, An Historical English Syntax, I (Leiden, 1963), 58.

4 Hulme, op. cit., p. 111.

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156 BENGT LINDSTRÖM

And 3eit bar comen a mekil steuen,Als it war a thoner of heuen,'Opin 3ur 3ates! 3e princes, wide,To blisful king, widvten bide!Bot qhan bat hell had herd all bisbat bis steuen tuis had paim soght,He said, als he had herd it noght,'Jjat king of blis, quat es he, pat?'1

In my reading of Middle English texts I have come across anothertwo instances of he that 'that man'. The first one occurs in Lydgate'sLife of Our Lady,2 in an account of the choosing of a husband, or rathera guardian, for Mary. Izachar the High Priest orders the unmarriedmen of the tribe of Juda to give him each a stick, which, by divine com-mand, he places in the Tabernacle. The men are to return on the follow-ing day to get their sticks back. Lines 672 ff. of Book I (pp. 294-95)read:

Vppon which, ther opynly was sayneA dove apere and vp to hevyn fleeHe that shall haue withoutyn more obstacleMarie in kepyng so fayre vpon to seeAs it is Right, for the high myracle.3

The meaning of this is: 'The man from whose stick a dove emergesshall have Mary in keeping.' The demonstrative that in 674 is omittedfrom only four of some forty extant manuscripts and is perhaps desir-able metri causa.

My second example is culled from the Prologue to Dives and Pauper(A.D. 1405-10).4 The bulk of the book is an exposition of the Ten Com-

1 R. Morris (ed.), Cursor Mundi, III, EETS, OS, 62 (London, 1876), p. 1039.The quotation is from the Göttingen MS.

2 Ed. J. A. Lauritis, V. F. Gallagher, and R. A. Klinefelter, Duquesne Studies,Philological Series, 2 (Pittsburgh, 1961).

3 Cf. also Lydgate's source, the Evangelium Pseudo-Matthaei (Tischendorf,op. cit., p. 67): ' . . . et ex cacumine unius virgae columba egreditur et volabitad caelos; in cujus manu virga reddita hoc signum dederit, ipsi tradatur Mariacustodienda.'

4 For extant manuscripts and the date and authorship of the book, see H. G.Richardson, 'Dives and Pauper', Notes and Queries, 11 Ser., 4 (1911), 321 ff.;H. G. Pfander, 'Dives et Pauper', The Library, 4 Ser., 14 (1933), 299 ff.; H. G.Richardson, 'Dives and Pauper', ibid., 15 (1934-35), 31 ff. There is no modernedition, but there are early prints by Pynson (1493), de Worde (1496) andBerthelet (1533). For the whereabouts of copies, see Redgrave and Pollard'sShort-Title Catalogue, p. 439.

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FOUR MIDDLE ENGLISH PASSAGES 157

mandments to which is prefixed a lengthy prologue .on Holy Poverty.The sentence in question, which I quote from MS 217 among the Hun-terian Collection at Glasgow University (fol. i6r), runs:

pu shalt nought temptyn pin Lord God. But he pat forsaky3t mannyshelpe qhanne he may han it, and seky3t only helpe of God, he pat tempty3tGod, as seyn pese clerkys.

It will probably be objected that the second he pat is scribal and dueto what textual critics call perseveration, i.e. the influence upon anygiven word of a word coming shortly before it. The objection is hardlyvalid; in the first place, because fourteen words intervene between thefirst and the second he pat; secondly, because the next sentence has thesame construction, but this time in the plural:

Ergo alle pat forsakyn rychesse and catel qhanne pey moun han it,qherby pey myghtyn lyuyn, and sekyn only helpe of God, as pu dost,pey poo temptyn God and doon a3en pe gospel.

The same use of poo as reinforcement recurs a few lines further on(fol. i6T):

Also pey poo temptyn God pat askyn helpe of hym and with pat hanno fey3t, or lytil, in hym.

No similar examples have been recorded to my knowledge.1

IV

In R. W. Chambers and Marjorie Daunt's London English 1384.-1425*pp. 129-30, we read:

Item William Brigis and John his man bringes vp newe Customes ofdiuerse men and wymen, ayenst pe Fredome of pe Cite, by faching ofwater and wasshing of clothes or pikyng of Chippes vpon pe communeGrounde, for whiche he maketh men to pay a certeyn to pe Toure.

There is no crux in this sentence, but it seems appropriate to directattention to it nevertheless, since it has been misinterpreted in a recentUmeâ dissertation by Berit Wik.3 Dr Wik states (p. 127): 'These [i.e.

1 Brit. Mus. MS Royal 17 C. XX, which I have collated with the HunterianMS, has all po instead of the first pey poo and plain pei instead of the second.

2 A Book of London English 1384-1425 (Oxford, 1967 [1931]).3 English Nominalizations in -ing. Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia, 12 (1973).

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is« BENGT LINDSTRÖM

fetching, wasshing, and pikyng] are instrumental gerunds preceded by apreposition since there is an Agent, or rather two Agents, WilliamBrigis and John his man, present serving as the subject of the sentence.'

Obviously William Brigis is the subject of bringes vp newe Customes(i.e. 'imposes new charges or dues'), but he is not the subject of thegerunds: it is not he who fetches water and washes clothes and picksfirewood on the common, it is the diuerse men and wymen who do that.In other words: William and his man make people pay for the right todo certain things that used to be free of charge. This is clear from the lastclause, which, for some reason, Dr Wik suppresses.

The point at which difficulty arises is the preposition by, whoseexact signification here is hard to determine. In present-day Englishone uses on to refer to 'that which forms the basis of income, taxation,borrowing, betting, profit or loss'. See OED, s.v. on, prep., 13. Thisusage is comparatively new; the earliest reference given is 1697. It ispossible that in Middle English by was used in these cases.

Be that as it may. The fact is that by is sometimes found in MiddleEnglish texts in the sense 'with reference or respect to'; see MED, s.v.bi, prep., 9 a, where the sentence under discussion is actually entered.

Of course, this minor mistake does not in any way reduce the value ofDr Wik's fine study.

BENGT LINDSTRÖM

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