The next section of this chapter gives an account of the features of these cultures that are most relevant to this study. I then develop a theory of lyric tactics, with reference to Certeau’s work, by way of a reading of the thirteenth-century English lyric “Fowls in the Frith.” While this book is most interested in examining the short poems of medieval England as a cultural production specific to a time and place, it also is cognizant of the provocative and fraught history of the term “lyric” within the discipline of literary studies and the anachronism of using this term to describe medieval poetry. This chapter thus concludes with a discussion of the difficulties of placing medieval English lyrics in the long history of the lyric genre and suggests how lyric tactics might offer an alternate literary history in which the medieval lyric is paradigmatic rather than marginal.
Text and Practice in Later Medieval England
The modes of textual transmission in later medieval England were diverse. An increase in the production of written texts, by scholastic and legal institutions, occurred within and alongside vibrant cultures of performance. Michael Clanchy’s landmark study, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, describes the sweeping post-Conquest changes in English legal culture as it shifts from a performative to a documentary system. Earlier legal culture was event based, centering on performances like the trothplight ceremony, in which symbolic clothing and objects as well as oaths spoken in the presence of witnesses confirmed a legally binding contract.17 The thirteenth century saw the rise of a documentary bureaucracy, energized by Henry II’s legal reforms and Edward I’s quo warranto proceedings, which asked the nobility to document “by what warrant” they held their franchises.18 When it appeared, Clanchy’s work formed part of a body of transdisciplinary scholarship evaluating the differences between oral and literate cultures, particularly the impact of written textuality on culture.19 The tone of this work oscillated between the elegiac and the triumphal. By some accounts, once supplanted by literacy, a lost oral culture survived only in fragments or performance practice quickly succumbing to the “technologizing of the word,” in Walter Ong’s evocative phrase. Yet literacy also drove the creation and adoption of new ways of organizing experience and cognition that drew on the conventions and structures of written texts.20
Lyrics circulate within and across these contexts in distinct and often partially attested forms. Yet when considered as one part of the multimodal practices of lyric performance, reception, and recording, we can think of these fragments not as relics of an extinct oral culture but as positive evidence of a comprehensive network of lyric practice, in which partial texts serve as records of and cues for a vibrant culture of performance and dissemination.21 What are described elegiacally as “lost” lyrics by R. M. Wilson often appear in a form similar to Cnut’s boat song: a verse or stanza quoted in another context, such as the partial English lyrics composed by St. Godric, or the single refrain line, “Swete lamman dhin are” (Sweet lover, your favor), recorded in a tale of a priest who misspeaks the mass after being kept awake by churchyard revelers.22 Flyleaves, margins, and unfilled folios of longer works often preserve lyrics or lyric fragments. Four haunting poems on a flyleaf of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson D 913, including “Maiden in the Moor Lay” and “Ich am of Irlaunde,” appear to be the lyrics of danced carols. In a collection of scientific treatises, an enigmatic verse appears following an account of the constellations: “Simenel hornes [horn-shaped loaves] ber non thornes Alleluya.”23 Lyrics and lyric fragments appear as pen trials or as appendages to longer works.24 They also survive in manuscript miscellanies or anthologies among nonlyric texts. As Julia Boffey puts it, “These poems were recorded unsystematically and often simply accidentally.”25 In other words, the written records of lyrics are unlike those of other medieval texts. Whereas a scientific treatise, theological summa, or even a long literary work is copied for preservation, with the expectation of consistency and completeness, written lyrics often bear witness in their very incompleteness to their survival in other contexts: in the popular memory, for instance, and in performance.
Even when complete lyrics survive, they tend to appear among diverse collections of texts. Clusters of English lyrics appear in both religious and secular commonplace books; two of these are discussed in later chapters.26 During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, English lyrics often appeared in sermons or in preachers’ handbooks. Such lyrics frequently served as summaries of the structure of a sermon (the distinctio) or as mnemonics to drive home important themes.27 What we seldom find in England, especially before the fifteenth century, are dedicated lyric “anthologies,” or single-genre codices. By comparison, England’s closest neighbor, France, produced many chansonniers of troubadour lyrics beginning in the thirteenth century.28 These “songbooks” canonized lyrics and their composers. They frequently arranged their contents by individual authors, with any anonymous lyrics clustered at the end; others were organized by subgenre (sirvente, jeu-parti, etc.). Features particular to the medieval manuscript further developed the identity of each poet, from portraits in illuminated initials, to rubrics naming the poet, to prefatory vidas describing the poet’s life. The first surviving single-author chansonnier, comprising the works of Adam de la Halle, dates from the early thirteenth century.29 These collections also gained generic force in Continental Europe, as the anthologizing of short poems gave rise to “poetry existing for and because of the book”: a lyric genre forged in writing rather than in performance, created as much by compilers and readers as by poets.30 Although later medieval England was not without its own “songbooks,” they are distinctly different from the French chansonniers. One of the best-known examples, British Library MS Harley 2253 (1330–40; the subject of the next chapter), includes no authorial attributions, and its lyrics appear among a trilingual collection of saints’ lives, verse sermons, and fabliaux. The preacher’s handbook of John of Grimestone, compiled in 1372, contains lyrics organized according to possible sermon themes. Richard Rolle’s lyrics were collected in single-author manuscripts, and collections of liturgical songs in Latin, French, and English, such as we find in the thirteenth-century manuscript British Library MS Arundel 248, are not uncommon. Yet English lyric manuscripts tend to be plain and unadorned by comparison with the lavishly illuminated chansonniers, indicating that lyrics occupied a different place in English culture than in French. Further, these recognizably anthologistic collections from England form only a small part of the material textual history of medieval English lyric, with lyrics more frequently found among diverse texts without recognizable generic organization. On the whole, the kind of authorizing and generic work that the chansonniers do for French lyric does not apply in England.
However, it is important to note that while the material forms of lyric texts in England and France differ significantly, English books frequently record French lyrics, reflecting the multilingualism of the English “vernacular.” French is an insular language in medieval England, less a foreign and colonizing tongue than a “common possession,” an idiom used in a broad array of cultural, social, or institutional contexts.31 Lyrics especially bear witness to England’s linguistic landscape. Many English lyric manuscripts (including the two studied in subsequent chapters) contain French and Latin texts. We find versions of the same lyric in French, English and Latin, such as the lyric beginning “Love is a selkud wodenesse [strange madness],” in Oxford, Bodleian MS Douce 139, where it is copied with Latin and French versions of the same quatrain.32 And we even find all three languages in the same lyric, as in the lyric beginning “Dum Ludis Floribus,” whose final stanza reads,
Scripsi hec carmina in tabulis;
Mon ostel est enmi la vile de Paris;
May Y sugge namore, so wel me is;
Yef Hi deye for love of hire, duel hit ys!
[I’ve written these songs on a tablet. My lodging’s amid the city of Paris. I may say no more, as seems best; should I die for love of her, sad it is!]33
Further, the relationship between a written text and its medieval performance