has been supposed, to an earlier Scottish text of which the extant version is a southernised transcript. Unfortunately, a hundred years earlier, the German version by Gottfried of Strasburg had also ascribed the authorship of the plot to a Thomas, and this Thomas could not possibly be Thomas of Ercildoune. It is possible, of course, that the Thomas mentioned in the German version and Thomas of Ercildoune both handled the story; but it is possible also that the fame of the prophecies of the Scottish Thomas led to the work of his unknown namesake being ascribed to him, and in the absence of any other Scottish work of this kind until many years later, this second theory seems the more credible of the two. The story, whoever wrote it, is told not without some skill, though with its full share of the surplusage by which so many of the later romances are damaged. As a specimen of its style and metre we may take the lines which tell how the famous love-potion mixed by Yseult's mother, and entrusted to the maiden Brengwain to cement the love of Yseult and King Mark, was unwittingly shared by Yseult and Tristram, to their undoing :

(Sir Tristrem; ed. G. P. M'Neill, Scottish Text Society, 1886, ll. 1644-1683.)

1 One against them three-that is, he rowed continuously, while they took turns. 2 A pin placed in the cup to measure the amount drunk. 3 That is, to drink; the To say is a mere expletive.

The story of Havelok the Dane, which in our own day provided Mr William Morris with the plot of his prose romance, Child Christopher, is of a king's son of one country and a king's daughter of another, each of them kept out of their rights by wicked guardians; of the hap which brings them together, and the might with which the king's son wins back both his own kingdom and his wife's. The fisherman Grim who was bidden to kill Havelok of Denmark brings him to England, and himself becomes the founder of Grimsby. Havelok wanders to Lincoln, and serves in the kitchen of the Earl Godrich of Cornwall, who is anxious to be rid of his ward Goldburgh, whose kingdom he enjoys. But her father had bidden the Earl marry Goldburgh to the handsomest and strongest man he could find, and when the kitchenlad Havelok performs wonderful feats of strength, he insists on Goldburgh marrying him in order to get her out of the way. Not unnaturally Goldburgh is very angry, and this is how she is reassured:

On the nith, als Goldeborw lay,
Sory and sorwful was she ay,
For she wende she were bi-swike,
That she were yeven un-kyndelike.
O nith saw she ther-inne a lith,
A swithe fayr, a swithe bryth,
Al so brith, al so shir,
So it were a blase of fir.

She lokede north, and ek south,
And saw it comen ut of his mouth
That lay bi hire in the bed:
No ferlike thou she were adred,
Thouthe she, 'Wat may this bi-mene!
He beth heyman yet, als y wene,
He beth heyman er he be ded:'
On hise shuldre, of gold red
She saw a swithe noble croiz;
Of an angel she herde a voyz:
'Goldeborw, lat thi sorwe be,
For Havelok, that haveth spuset the,
[Is] kinges sone, and kinges eyr,
That bikenneth that croiz so fayr.
It bikenneth more, that he shal
Denemark haven and Englond al;
He shal ben king strong and stark
Of Engelond and Denemark;
That shalt thu wit thine eyne sen,
And tho shalt quen and levedi ben.'

night-as

deceived

I

light

exceedingly

clear

fire

out

2

Thought nobleman

CTOSS voice

espoused heir betokens

lady

(The Lay of Havelok the Dane; ed. W. W. Skeat, E.E.T.S., 1868, ll. 1247–1274.)

1 Given (that is, in marriage) unnaturally. No wonder though she were afraid.

Havelok takes Goldburgh to Grimsby, and by the help of Grim's sons and another faithful friend, Ubbe, he recovers Denmark and puts the usurper

to a cruel death. Then he wins England from Earl Godrich, and he and Goldburgh live there happily, leaving Denmark to Ubbe. The story is told rapidly and well, and is doubtless founded on old English legend, the memory of which is still preserved in the ancient seal of Grimsby, which shows 'Gryem,' with sword and shield, and little figures of 'Habloc' and 'Goldeburgh' on either side of him.

King Horn is also a good story, not unlike Havelok, and well told; but it is less simple and more conventional. It has come down to us in three manuscripts, and whereas in two of these Horn's father is called King Murry, in the third his name is Allof. The 'Saracens' slay Allof; and though they will not kill Horn because of his beauty, they set him adrift in a boat with twelve companions. The boat carries them to Westernesse, and there Horn wins the love of Rymenhild, the king's daughter. His secret is betrayed to her father by his false friend Fikenhild, and he sets off in search of adventures, receiving from Rymenhild a magic ring. He returns, disguised as a pilgrim, just as Rymenhild is about to be married to a King Modi. Here is the scene when Horn makes himself known to her as she is offering wine to the guests:

Horn sat upon the grunde,
In thughte he was i-bunde,
He sede Quen, so hende,
To me-ward thu wende,
Thu gef us with the furste,
The beggeres beoth of thurste.'
Hure horn heo leide adun,
And fulde him of a brun,
His bolle of a galun,

bound, wrapped

gentle

she

filled from a brown jug bowl that held a gallon she

For heo wende he were a glotoun,

He seide, 'Have this cuppe,

And this thing [?] ther uppe:
Ne sagh ihc nevre, so ihc wene,
Beggere that were so kene.'

Horn tok hit his ifere,

And sede 'Quen, so dere,
Wyn nelle ihc muche ne lite
Bute of cuppe white.

Thu wenest I beo a beggere,

And ihc am a fissere,
Wel feor i-come bi este

For fissen at thi feste;

Mi net lith her-bi-honde,
Bi a wel fair stronde,
Hit hath i-leie there

Fulle seve yere.
Ihc am i-come to loke

Ef eni fiss hit toke.

Ihc am i-come to fisse :
Drink to me of disse,
Drink to Horn of horne:
Feor ihc am i-orne.'
Rymenhilde him gan bihelde,
Hire heorte bigan to chelde,
Ne kneu heo noght his fissing,
Ne Horn hymselve nothing:
Ac wunder hire gan thinke,
Whi he bad to Horn drinke.

I

I

I will not

fisher

2

hard by

seven

dish, bowl

journeyed

grow cold

Miracle-Plays and the Cursor Mundi.

Reference has already been made (page 34) to the first miracle-plays acted in England. By the beginning of the fourteenth century a great change had come over these representations, but of the gradual stages by which it must have developed we know very little. The dramatic poem of the Harrowing of Hell, which is thought by some critics to be as early as the reign of Henry III., is the only extant remnant of this period when the plays had begun to be written in English, and were still of such a character that they might be acted in church. It contains some two hundred and forty lines, and begins with a prologue, whose openingAlle herkneth to me nou, A strif wil I tellen you, Of Jesu and of Satan

makes it uncertain whether it should be regarded only as a poem intended for recitation or as really dramatic. But the speeches which follow, spoken by Christ and Satan, Hell's Porter, Adam, Eve, Abraham, David, John Baptist, and Moses, form a perfect little play; and their beauty and directness may be well illustrated by the opening colloquy, which is here given as printed in the appendix to English Miracle-Plays, Moralities, and Interludes, edited by A. W. Pollard, third ed. 1898:

Dominus. Hardė gatės have I gon,
Sorewes suffred mani on;
Thritti winter and thridde half yer
Have I woned in londe her.
Almost is so michel gan,
Sithen I bicam first man ;

Ich have sithen tholed and wist
Hot and cold, hunger and thrist:
Man hath don me shame inoh.
With word and dede in here woh;

ways

one

I

dwelt

much gone

suffered

thirst enough evil

Dialogue like this gives us the best idea we can attain of such a play of the Resurrection as, according to the Handlyng Synne (supra, page 41), might lawfully be acted by a priest in church to teach the unlearned. But in the same passage Mannyng mentions, though only to reprobate, the acting of plays 'in weyes or grenes,' and this removal from the church and its precincts speedily altered their character. In every important English town at this period there were guilds of the different trades or crafts, with objects partly religious, partly secular, and these guilds during the fourteenth century took the acting of the miracle-plays very largely into their own hands. In 1311 the Council of Vienne enjoined the strict observance of the festival of Corpus Christi, and in many towns this day, or in some instances its eve, was selected by the guilds for the annual performances of their

plays, though in other towns these were given at Whitsuntide. Both Whitsuntide and Corpus Christi, which falls on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, although movable feasts, always come within a few weeks of the longest day, and as the plays began between four and five in the morning, there was time enough before sunset for a series of performances of what seems to us enormous length. These Corpus Christi and Whitsuntide representations were thus restricted to no single subject, such as the Nativity or the Resurrection, but embraced 'matter from the beginning of the world' to the Day of Judgment. Their rise into importance during the fourteenth century is thus closely connected with the popularity of the great narrative poem on the same subject, the cursor Mundi, so called by its unknown author because it 'runs over' the world's history. In some manuscripts this poem extends to nearly thirty thousand lines, and it groups its subject under 'seven ages,' the first ending with the Flood, the second with Babel, the third with the death of Saul, the fourth with the Captivity of Judah, the fifth with the preaching of John the Baptist. The sixth age begins with the Baptism of Christ, and extends to the Finding of the Cross by the Empress Helena ; the seventh and last is taken with a bound to the Day of Judgment. The main sources from which this long poem was compiled are the Bible, sometimes directly, sometimes as its story is retold in the Historia Scholastica of Petrus Comestor (written c. 1175), the apocryphal Gospels, the Chasteau d'Amour or Carmen de Creatione Mundi of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, and the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine. It is thus a storehouse of medieval legend as well as of biblical history, and its popularity was very great. The Cursor was edited for the Early English Text Society by Dr Richard Morris in four different versions, with the aid of six other manuscripts, and seems to have been the first English book which was copied and recopied again and again. Writing in Northumbria, probably about 1320, the author prefaces his poem with a prologue of two hundred and seventy lines, in which he notes how eager men were in his day to read 'rimes' and 'gestes,' the romances of Alexander and Julius Cæsar, of Greece and Troy, of Brut who conquered England, of King Arthur, Gawain and Kay, of Tristram and Isoude, and of the wars of Charlemagne and Roland with the Saracens. His own aim is to sing of the Blessed Virgin, and he will therefore 'run over' all the events which led to the Incarnation, and tell sum gestes principale.' Lastly, after summarising the contents of his book, he proceeds (II. 232-248), like other writers of his day, to justify himself for writing in English :

This ilké boke is translate
In-to Inglis tonge to rede
For the love of Inglis lede,
Inglis lede of Ingeland.
For the commun to understande

people

One of the most interesting sections of the Cursor Mundi, and the one which hitherto has defied all attempts to trace it to its source, is the mythical history of the Cross on which Christ died. The quotation which must serve as our chief specimen of the poem relates to its finding ('invention') by the Empress Helena, and joins on in a curious way to Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice-the Jew who guides the Empress to the place where the three crosses are found being the prototype of Shylock, and giving up his secret to save himself from the punishment pronounced on him for having sought to enforce his bond for a pound of flesh from a Christian :

miration, and its popularity, as has already been noted, was very great. Partly no doubt through its influence the cyclical miracle-plays came rapidly into favour during the fourteenth century, more especially in the north of England, where the Cursor was best known. The York cycle as we now have it is made up of no fewer than fortyeight different plays, of which one to six deal with the Creation and Fall; seven to eleven with the Murder of Abel, the Flood, the Sacrifice of Isaac, and the Exodus; twelve to nineteen with the Prophecies of Christ's Advent and the incidents of the Nativity; twenty to twenty-four with some of the chief events of His ministry; twenty-five to thirty-six with the Passion; thirty-seven to fortyfour with the Harrowing of Hell, Resurrection, the appearance of Christ to His disciples, the Ascension and Gift of the Holy Spirit; forty-five to forty-seven with the death of the Blessed Virgin, her appearance to St Thomas, Assumption, and Coronation; and the forty-eighth with the Day of Judgment. In other cycles some incidents were added and others omitted, but the general sequence of the plays was much the same, and there can be no doubt that at the outset their intention was wholly didactic and religious, and that they must have contributed not a little to the instruction of the ignorant. Their final development in the fifteenth century will be touched on again; but it is clear from Chaucer's allusions that long before his day the dramatists had sought to relieve the strain on the spectators by the introduction of humorous incidents, the quarrel of Noah and his wife when the time came to go into the ark being already a stock scene, while the ranting of Pilate and Herod was also a well-established convention. We know, moreover, that at York before 1378 the management of the different plays was already divided out between the different crafts, and it is probable that the allusions to the method of representation which have been gleaned from later records apply equally well to these fourteenthcentury performances. As early as Lent, we are told, the 'moste connyng discrete and able players' the city could furnish were selected, all other insufficiant personnes, either in connyng, voice or personne,' being sternly 'discharged, ammoved and avoided.' A first rehearsal would be held in Easter week, a second in Whitsun week, and at both these the players would be refreshed with bread and ale-this and other expenses being defrayed by a levy, varying from a penny to fourpence, on every member of the guild. No player was allowed to take more than two parts, and he would receive for his services, according to his ability and the parts he played, sums varying from fourpence to four shillings, the latter amount being worth about £2, 10s. of modern money. The dresses in which these players were attired were more magnificent than appropriate. We hear of Herod wearing a blue satin gown with a helmet gilded and silvered, of Pilate in a green robe, of

At

Judas in yellow; while the player who took the part of Christ wore a coat of white sheepskin and red sandals. The stages or 'pageants' on which the performances took place are described as high scaffolds, with two rooms, a higher and a lower, upon four wheels.' In the lower the players apparelled themselves; in the higher, which was open at the top, they played. On the morning of the performance each pageant would be rolled out of its shed and dragged in its turn to the first of the 'stations' at which the plays were acted. The first performance over, the pageant would be dragged through the streets to the second station, and then the play repeated. York each play was performed twelve times, and occasionally oftener, the choice of the stoppingplaces or stations being determined by the liberality of the owners of the adjacent houses. These contributions were much needed, for the cost of the plays fell heavily on the guilds; five or six of them had sometimes to club together to produce a single pageant, while the sharing of the expenses led to frequent disputes. In a few cases the reason for the assignment of a play to a particular guild is obvious; thus the Shipwrights or Fishmongers commonly interested themselves in Noah and the Flood, while the Goldsmiths and Goldbeaters played the Magi. But as a rule the wealth of the guild and the cost of the necessary dresses and stage properties were the chief considerations.

Four cycles of miracle-plays have come down to us, three connected respectively with York, Wakefield, and Chester, and a fourth, probably written in the East-Midlands, but, by a tradition with very little claim to respect, passing under the name of Coventry. The York, Wakefield, and Chester cycles were probably all in existence by the middle of the fourteenth century, though not in the form in which we have them. Partly to suit the convenience of the crafts, partly to please the changing .taste of audiences, plays were from time to time added or taken away, or recast in a new form, while the scribes of our manuscripts seem frequently to have depended on imperfect oral tradition. It is possible, however, sometimes to pick out the older work from its surroundings, and we may take the scene between Isaac and his sons (for the sake of comparison with the quotation already given on page 40 from the Genesis) as an example of the Wakefield plays in their earliest form:

Isaac. Thou art begyled thrugh Iacob, That is thyne awne german brother. thine own full brother Esau. Have ye kepyd me none other Blyssyng then ye set hym one?

Isaac. Sich another have I none;
Bot God gif the to thyn handband
The dew of heven and frute of land;
Other then this can I not say.

Esau. Now, alas, and walo-way!
May I with that tratoure mete,
My faders dayes shall com with grete,
And my moders also;

May I hym mete I shall hym slo.

covenanted portion

weeping

slay

(The Towneley Plays; re-edited by George England, E.E.T.S., 1897. Play v. ll. 1-40.)

The great themes of the miracle-plays, especially Christ's Passion, which is always treated in vivid detail, are handled with medieval familiarity, yet not without feeling. But there are no passages in which the unknown authors rise sufficiently to the dignity of their subject to make detached quotations helpful. Even the play on the sacrifice of Isaac, which more than one of the playwrights invests with real pathos, is a little spoilt by repetition and prolixity. The lighter side of the miracle-plays is more easily illustrated by the stock scene of 'the sorrow of Noah and his fellowship,' as Chaucer calls it, when Noah's wife refused to come into the ark. It is best given in the Chester cycle, from which, therefore, we here quote, though the text, as we have it, represents a version probably somewhat later than our period, and itself belongs to the end of the sixteenth century. As here printed it has been purged of some of the corruptions of the Elizabethan scribe:

Noah. Wif, com in: why standes thou there? Thou art ever forward, I dar well swere;

Com in, on Goddes halfe! time it were, for God's sake For fere lest that we drowne.

Noah's Wife. Yea, sir, sette up your saile, And rowe forth with evil haile,

For withouten any faile

I will not out of this towne.

But I have my gossippes everychon,
One foot further I will not gon;

They shall not drowne, by Sante John!

And I may save ther life.

with ill-luck