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When Nettles in Winter Bring Forth Roses Red

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Francis Lee Utley
Francis Lee Utley*
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
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Extract

Adequate attention has never been paid to the fifteenth-century lying-song which advises us to trust women when nettles bear roses and other wild impossibilities come to pass. There are three manuscript versions:

  • A. Bodl. 29734 (Eng. poet. e. 1—second half XV cent.), f. 43b;

  • B. Balliol Oxf. 354 (Hill's Commonplace Book—first half XVI cent.), f. 250b;

  • C. BM Printed Book IB 55242 (MS. notes in Trevisa's Bartholomeus Anglicus, de Worde, 1495), ff. 477b–478b.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 60 , Issue 2 , June 1945 , pp. 346 - 355
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1945

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References

Note 1 in page 346 Other modern editions than those cited are listed in Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins, The Index of Middle English Verse (New York, 1943), no. 3999.

Note 2 in page 346 Oxford, 1935, no. 402.

Note 3 in page 346 Gerould's review of Greene, Speculum, xii (1936), 299; see also Greg's review, RES, xiii (1937), 85–86 and Greene, pp. cviii, cx.

Note 4 in page 346 Songs, Carols, and Other Miscellaneous Poems, EETSES 101 (London 1908), p. 114.

Note 5 in page 346 Anglia, xxxii (1909), 358.

Note 6 in page 346 The omission of 1.5 is the only lacuna due to the scribe; the rest are due to crumbling paper and a ruthless binder. 6.3–7 is lost through damage at bottom of page; 7.1–3 through damage at top. I wish to thank the authorities of the British Museum for permission to print the text from photostats.

Note 7 in page 347 Pages cxxxv, 432. Brown, in his review of Greene, MLN, lii (1937), 127, refuses to consider “this wholly non-lyrical poem in 7-line stanzas” as a carol at all, and asserts that where Greene's various carols disagree in this matter nearly all of the “older and better versions … lack the burden.”

Note 8 in page 349 François Villon, Œuvres, ed. Louis Thuasne (Paris, 1923), iii, 521. See also L. Sainéan, La Langue de Rabelais (Paris, 1922–23), I, 72; ii, 117; and Ducange, Glossarium Mediae et Infirmae Latinitatis, ed. L. Favre (Niort, 1883–87), s.v. relho and habilimentum.

Note 9 in page 349 Fréderic Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l'Ancienne Langue Française (Paris, 1881–1902), vii, 248. He cites Platine de honneste volupié: “Les rouillons sont semblables aux trillies; au lac d'Albe en a beaucop, et nayssent principalement au Tybre.” The origin is unexplained, but one may hazard a guess that it is a red fish, connected with rouil “rust” from VL robiculum (see Ernst Gamillscheg, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Französisches Sprache [Heidelberg, 1928], p. 774).

Note 10 in page 349 NED Rullion (2), glossed “some form of ornament in metal-work,” may be the same word, and evidence of British currency. The NED cites a Scottish source (1488–1606): “Antique Medusa's heads and rullion foliages…. Betwixt each statue arises a rullion in form of a dolphine, very distinct.” The “dolphine” suggests rouillon, but arrow-foliage (raillon?) is well-known.

Note 11 in page 352 B preserves one other archaic form (6.2 ben), where C is damaged.

Note 12 in page 353 In an earlier text extreme South Midland or Southern would have been indicated by the rime reed: meed (1.1, 1.3). While it is impossible to base anything certain on the rimes mell: sell: kell (mill, sell, kill), it is interesting to note that kel, mel, and zei would rime only in modern Dorset, and kil, mil, and zil only in east Devon and northwest Wiltshire; see Joseph Wright, The English Dialect Grammar (Oxford, 1905), pp. 498, 528, 589.

Note 13 in page 353 Greene, p. cviii. Greene does not commit himself to the dangerous assumption that A was a Franciscan, but he elsewhere ably argues for the influence of the Franciscans on the carol. Robbins believes, however, that the Franciscan monopoly of the carol had diminished in the fifteenth century; see his “The Earliest Carols and the Franciscans,” MLN, liii (1938), 239.

Note 14 in page 354 On the scribes and contents see Flügel, Anglia, xxvi (1903), 94; and Dyboski, pp. xiii–lix.

Note 15 in page 354 The Nut-Brown Maid, The Sacrifice of the Mass, and The Seven Sages are the others. Hill also signed a prose tract On Graffyng Trees and included his own name in several personal memoranda.

Note 16 in page 354 Dyboski, p. xvi.

Note 17 in page 354 The fullest account is that of W. H. St. John Hope, “Notes on the Holy Blood of Hayles,” The Archaeological Journal, lxviii (1911), 166–172; see also Cardinal Gasquet, Henry VIII and the English Monasteries (London, 1902), ii, 536–541, and the notes by Skeat and by Robinson to The Pardoner's Tale, vi, 652.

Note 18 in page 355 Hope, p. 169; see also Gasquet, ii, 536. The letter is calendared as no. 347 of Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, xiii, part 1 (London, 1892), p. 119.

Note 19 in page 355 Letters and Papers, xiii, part 2, p. 272.

Note 20 in page 355 From Wriothesley's Chronicle as quoted Hope, p. 171.

Note 21 in page 355 F. J. Furnivall, Ballads from Manuscripts (London [Ballad Society], 1868–72), i, 313. Among the few echoes of the original it is worthy of note that lines 1–2, with their mention of sparrows and cranes, favor the readings of C 5.1 and 5.5.