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Carter Revard

A Goliard's Feast and the Metanarrative of Harley 2253


In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire. Tome 83 fasc. 3, 2005. Langues et littratures modernes - Moderne taal
en litterkunde. pp. 841-867.

Citer ce document / Cite this document :


Revard Carter. A Goliard's Feast and the Metanarrative of Harley 2253. In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire. Tome 83
fasc. 3, 2005. Langues et littratures modernes - Moderne taal en litterkunde. pp. 841-867.
doi : 10.3406/rbph.2005.4946
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/rbph_0035-0818_2005_num_83_3_4946

A Goliard's Feast
and the metanarrative
ofHarley2253

Carter Revard

1.

Introduction
The present essay offers a new edition and translation of an Anglo-Norman
text that has gone almost undiscussed, either for itself or for its place and role in a
trilingual manuscript of great importance, BL MS Harley 2253 (see Fein : 2000).
This poem, Quant voy la revenue d'yver, which will here be titled (for reasons that
will become apparent) A Goliard's Feast, is a self-satirizing dramatic monologue
of a Glutton or Goliard. (l) A Continental French version of it was copied into a
contemporary manuscript of Burgundian provenance that is now Burgerbibliothek
Bern, cod. 354, indicating that the poem circulated more widely than has been
appreciated by scholars, who in discussing MS Harley 2253 have focused mainly
on its Middle English texts, especially the famous "Harley Lyrics" (see Brook :
1968). Other texts in Harley 2253 especially Anglo-Norman ones also
circulated in Ireland, England, and on the Continent, showing that the scribe who
gathered those texts was no mere provincial scrivener, but could access and copy
matter from those wider regions. Moreover, he has chosen and arranged this and
the other texts within Harley 2253 so that, in reading the whole anthology, we
observe that it has a dialectic metanarrative an overall "story" that controls its
thematic sequencings and oppositional arrangements of texts. Seeing how this
metanarrative shaped the compilation and copying of Harley 2253, we realize the
manuscript was constructed for, and used as, a household book in a particular
tradition: that leading from the Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi to the
(1) The poem is titled "Tavern Song" by Dean (1999, p. 87): "A song about the trials of winter
and the joys of the tavern and good food (with long lists of meat and fish), ending 'e je m'en voys
donks dormyr.' Written as prose, with irregular rhyme-scheme, it is difficult to reduce to form.
Lines seem intended to be of four, five, or six syllables. Capital letters with or without paragraph
marks appear to mark the song into ten stanzas of irregular length. It fills two columns of 45 and 46
11.: the editor made 243 [recte, 143] verses of it." The editor Dean cites is Wright (1842, pp. 13-18).
She refers to but does not discuss the Continental French version in Bern, Burgerbibliothek cod.
354 (fols. 1 12v-l 14r), printed by Mon (1823, 1, pp. 301-305). She calls the Harley 2253 poem "a
celebration of seasonal food and drink," noting that its stanzaic form is "hard to elicit..., both
because it is written in long lines with the ends of verses and stanzas only occasionally indicated
and because the rhymes are often obscured, since it is an Anglo-Norman copy of a continental
French original" (p. 330, and fh. 8). See (Dove : 1970 and 2000).

842

CARTER REVARD

Decameron and the Canterbury Tales. (2) The present essay, then, begins with a
discussion of one poem, A Goliard's Feast, and broadens out to offer a "reader' seye view" of Harley 2253 as a household anthology.
A Goliard's Feast was first printed (untitled) by Thomas Wright in 1842, the
Continental version of it in 1 823 by D. M. Mon with the title La Devise aux
Lecheors. In Harley 2253 the poem is written as prose, and its irregular rhymescheme makes line-breaks doubtful; as I have made them, the Harley 2253 version
has 161 lines. Hagen, in his Catalogue of Cod. 354, divides the texts into three
groups: Group One (fols. 1-175) has 75 texts titled Dits et Fabliaux; Group Two
(fols. 184-205) has a single text, Roman de VII Sages de Rome; and Group Three
(fols. 206-74) contains only Li romanz de parceval by Chrtien de Troyes. (3) So
Cod. 354 contains 175 fols, of fabliaux and dits, and 100 of "romances" one of
the latter being a didactic frame-story collection of exempla, the other a long
courtly romance of the Grail Knight. It is therefore like certain other manuscript
anthologies that is, a planned mix of fabliau and romance that I have
discussed elsewhere, and some of its fabliau / dit items occur also in the
manuscripts considered in that essay: besides Harley 2253, these include Paris, BN
MSS 837 and 19182; Bodleian MS Digby 86; and the Carmina Burana (Revard :
2000a, pp. 261-278).
For instance, we find A Goliard's Feast in both cod. 354 and Harley 2253,
and Harley 2253 contains an -N version of Le chevalier qui fist les cons parler,
whose Continental French version is in cod. 354. In cod. 354 is a debate between
Hueline and Eglantine over the merits as courtly lovers of Knights and Clerics; in
Harley 2253, a debate between sensual Gilote and virgin Johane; opening lines of
these debates are quite similar, and Gilote has a knight as lover and provides a
(2) For Petrus Alfonsi see (Tolan : 1993). For "oppositional thematics" in Chaucer see
(Cooper : 1997). For Disciplina Clericalis as model for the Harley 2253 anthology, and for
"oppositional thematics" as a key to Harley 2253, see (Revard : 1982, 1999, 2000 and 2001); also
(Nolan : 2000, pp. 289-292). With Tolan (1993, p. 16), I believe Andreas Capellanus's The Art of
Courtly Love in its dialogue format and sic et non dialectic shows the influence of Petrus Alfonsi,
and the texts in Harley 2253 are so arranged that the reader encounters frequent use of sic et non
examples and pro-and-con exempla of love and lovers. Nolan (2000, pp. 291-92) says of quires 12,
13, and 14, "the principles of hierarchy, contrariety, and exemplary mirroring... seem to have
entered into the ordering of Harley 2253", and the principles apply well in quires 5-11 and 15. I
have elsewhere (MMLA, St. Louis 1998, a paper under revision for publication) discussed relations
of the manuscript's "political / timely" poems to its "lyrical / "timeless" ones; see note 19 below.
(3) The contents of Bern cod. 354 are listed by Hagen (1875, pp. 338-345). He describes it as a
quarto dating from the fourteenth century containing at present 274 folios, adding: Post f. 13
habetur unum folium sine numeratione et post f. 55 et 135 desunt singuli vel pluri quaterniones. F.
136-75 ponenda ante f. 56 (cf. custodemf. 175b). Folia 206 et 207 vacant. Fuit Henrici Stephani et
Goldastii. Codicem descripsit Jubinal in libro cui titulus est: Lettre au directeur d'artiste, Paris,
1838. (I am most grateful to the director and staff of the Bern Burgerbibliothek for supplying me
with a microfilm copy of cod. 354 to examine for the present study.) See also (Noomen et Van
Boogaard : 1996), (Rossi : 1985), (Rychner : 1984) and (Nolan : 2000).

A GOLIARD 'S FEAST AND THE METANARRATIVE OF HARLEY 2253

843

cleric as lover for Johane, whereupon the two of them like Apostles preach the
gospel of sensual love throughout England and Ireland and convert the multitudes
to their doctrine and practice. There are similar debates between two women in
Digby 86 as well as in Paris, BN MS fr. 837 in which we hear, as it were, the
grandmothers of the Wife of Bath. (4)
Of the debate-poems in Harley 2253, however, the Debate of Summer and
Winter (5) is the one crucial to a right reading not only of A Goliard's Feast, but of
the whole anthology. It is the second of two Anglo-Norman poems that make up
Quire 5 (fols. 49-52), which the scribe has set at the very beginning of the portion
of Harley 2253 that he has copied (fols. 49-140). Close reading shows that the
debate between its two great opposites, far from being inconclusive as one might
expect, is won by Summer because Summer, as he truly claims, has been sent
from Paradise to make the world good for its inhabitants, whereas Winter, as he
finally admits, descends from Lucifer, well known to be "of the North". Yet
Winter truly observes that Summer brings in his train flies, toads, and snakes
and, as I have elsewhere argued, (*) the scribe expected sophisticated readers
(helped by a Nun's Priest, as it were?) to understand that these "flies, toads, and
snakes" correspond to the pains and perversions of earthly love such as we see
beautifully exemplified in the manuscript's famous lovesongs. The truly Paradisal
songs of the heaven-sent Summer, of course, are those of divine love, especially
those of the Virgin Mary, but also of all women so the scribe has emphasized in
the other Anglo-Norman poem, ABC femmes, which he has placed first of all,
just ahead of the Debate of Summer and Winter.
(4) The opening lines of Hueline et Eglantine (cod. 354) and Gilote et Johane (Harley 2253)
are:
Berne 354
Harley 2253
Ce fu en mai, el tans d'est
En mai par vne matyne sen a la juer
que l'aunt herbe creit o pre. . .
en vn vert bois rame vn jevene cheualer
si oyd deus femmes entremedler
For the two women-debates see (Dean : 1999), pp. 111-112, items 193 {Gilote et Johane) and 194
(L 'Estrif de Deux Femmes, also known as Le Dit de la Folle et de la Sage, with Anglo-Norman
version in Bodleian MS Digby 86 and Continental version in Paris, BN MS fr. 837). For the debate
of chaste/ unchaste women in Digby 86 see (Corrie : 1997 and 2000). Digby 86 contains Le
Chastoiment d'un Pre a son Fils, an AN redaction of the Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi,
as well as two ME adaptations from it, Dame Sirith and Fox and Wolf; for the Chastoiment see
(Dean : 1999), pp. 148-149; for Digby 86 and its contents, see (Tschann and Parkes : 1996). Very
useful discussions of Harley 2253 and Digby 86 are found in (Hines : 1993), which are greatly
enhanced and extended in a forthcoming book, Voices in the Past, English Literature and
Archology (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), chapter 3, pp. 71-104.
(5) For the Debate of Summer and Winter in Harley 2253 (Dean : 1999, p. 85, item 146), and
some Continental analogues in Latin and vernacular languages, see (Reichl : 2000); for an edition /
translation of it, see (Bossy : 1987), pp. 2-15.
(6) In a paper delivered April 5, 2003, to the conference on Manuscripts of the West Midlands
at the University of Birmingham. It is being considered for publication.

844

CARTER REVARD

A very different text, which resembles and helps us understand the wintry
sluggard of A Goliard's Feast, is a manual in AN verse made for teaching and
using the French language, written in the later 13C by Walter de Bibbesworth. His
manual was copied by the Franciscan friar William Herebert into BL MS
Additional 46919 in early 14C, probably in Hereford just twenty miles south of
Ludlow, where Harley 2253 was being copied (with A Goliard's Feast) not much
later. Herebert also copied into Additional 46919 culinary recipes in Middle
English that translate the AN recipes copied by the scribe of Harley 2253 into a
second manuscript (BL MS Royal 12.C.X) that he compiled over the years 13161349. (7) These recipes bear indirectly on our reading of A Goliard's Feast a
glutton's self-satirizing monologue.
Reading A Goliard's Feast, as with other such self-satirizing poems, (8) we
do not at first realize the speaker's nature: in lines 1-10 (for the text, see Appendix
One), we hear a complaint against winter's return by someone with whom we can
be fully sympathetic, so at first we are fellows of the speaker, sharing his
discomfort with winter's cold, his delight in a crackling fire. But as he goes on
(lines 11-16), a tone of self-indulgence creeps in, a hint of slothfulness, such
insistence on comfort and ease that the speaker begins to sound like a sluggard,
turning in his bed like a door on its hinges. At first this is only a hint, a very
slightly excessive insistence on just the RIGHT kind of fire, and surely we listeners
agree that the fire he imagines is just the kind we too would like in our bedrooms:
"a faggot in the hearth dry and smokeless, which brightens everything, and turns to
embers".
But now the poem's speaker begins to luxuriate, to bask, and scratch himself
and (at this point a reader may fall out of sympathy) we notice that he is not too
clean, that indeed (as he confides) he stinks, and his clothes are lousy; a doubt
suddenly intrudes as to whether the bedclothes are all that clean. He insists that he
loves clean linen, but we begin to suspect what we are hearing from him is more
daydream than reality: "for the flesh really stinks, and it's badly clothed" (lines 19(7) For London, British Library MS Additional 46919, see the Catalogue of Additional
Manuscripts in the British Museum (1950). For Bibbesworth's Trtiz de Langage see (Dean :
1999), pp. 160-161, item 285, and (Rothwell : 1990).
(8) Within Harley 2253, such poems include Satire on the Consistory Courts (f. 70v) and Man
in the Moon (f. 1 14v), which with other "confessional satires" are discussed in (Revard : 2001), pp.
359-406. Readers of Harley 2253 were meant to recognize others of its texts as self-satirizing
monologues the most important example being the speeches of Winter in the Debate of Summer
and Winter, echoed in A Goliard's Feast, though space forbids illlustration of this. Others, I
suggest, include the Song of Lewes (f. 58v), the Song ofTrailbaston (f. 1 13v), the Jongleur d'Ely et
le Roi d'Angleterre (f. 107v), and the ME "Harley Lyric" With longyngy am lad. The Jongleur is a
key (as I argue in a forthcoming essay) to the scribe's inclusion of fabliaux, and to his intended
ways of reading those with other texts in Quires 12, 13, and 14, just as the ABC femmes and the
Debate of Summer and Winter are keys to the scribe's selection and arrangement of texts in Quires
5 through 9.

A GOLIARD 'S FEAST AND THE METANARRATIVE OF HARLEY 2253

845

20). He almost recovers from this in lines 21-24, when he says how much he loves
the morning, and might have regained our sympathy had he just referred to the
vigorous activities that winter brings hunting, for instance, or any kind of
sociable activity appropriate for a man in winter. But instead, like the much greater
Sir Gawain who slept in at the Castle of Hautdesert until his host's beautiful wife
came to wake and tempt him, this poem's homme moyen sensuel turns back (lines
25-33) to his bed and fire, confiding to us his love of clean linen fresh from the
laundry, of warm bed-covers and fur-lined clothes and then sneers at unfurred
robes as low-class!
So he is lazy, he stinks, he is low-class yet a snob, and his mind is wholly on
high-class luxuries that we must suspect he himself is too poor to possess. And
now his monologue lets us see one reason why he lacks money for luxuries: he
loves dice, particularly the kind that will roll right for him (lines 34-38).
At this point , the Anglo-Norman and Continental versions of his monologue
differ significantly. Lines 38-43 of Bern cod. 354 may be translated: "When I get
up to piss / in the morning, / I'm really pained / When I see the steam [presumably
rising from warm urine into the cold air] / being formed / into icicles ". The AngloNorman text omits reference to going out into the snow to urinate, and its text
looks as if it has been somewhat lamely redacted to cover the omission. Perhaps, if
the poem were originally in Continental French, and if the Harley 2253 scribe's
redaction was chosen as a humorous "bad example" monologue that could
nevertheless be used for teaching French to young persons, the scribe toned down
the raunchiness of the original poem to suit such a "PG-13 audience".
In the next lines (45-54), the speaker turns from the joys of a solitary bed to
the delights of feasting, and we realize that this Goliard has here begun to describe
a life of gluttonous feasting beginning (1. 47) with a loin of roast pork, well
fattened (pris en bone pasture), which he fastidiously notes he does not want
charred. (A further divergence between the two texts occurs at this point lines
49 through 55 and while the sense is much the same, lineation and textsequence differ so that in my edition I have re-located the lines of cod. 354 so that
they correspond to the order of the lines as copied into Harley 2253.)
By line 56, when the Goliard has told us the kinds of spiced wine he loves,
and how much more he likes wine than "smoke-tinged beer" (cervoyse enfume),
we understand that the poem is a Goliard' s daydream of loafing and
gourmandizing: he is a lazy, self-indulgent, but clever glutton who is imagining, in
winter, the warm fires, wines and endless dishes of food, the warm clothes and
bedding that he wants to enjoy, now and as the rest of the poem shows
throughout the year. He is certainly like Langland' s Glutton, but he has a higherclass sensibility not for him the smoky beer that Glutton swills. I think he
resembles the Arch-Poet, haunting the hall as well as the tavern: he refers at line
88 to vyn de haute persone, and in lines 157-8 refers to a large house with both a
cold-cellar and a high sun-room. He tells us (Harley text, lines 57ff.) that he loves

846

CARTER REVARD

the tavern well, that he spiced his drinks there with galingale, zedoary, and hot
pepper (in this he is like Langland' s Glutton, who loved the pepper and spices that
Gossip put into his ale). He speaks of putting mustard on his salted meat at
Christmastime (64-66), then launches into a list of all the game-fowl and domestic
fowls he wants to eat (lines 67ff.) and we see that in the latter two-thirds of the
poem (57-161) his listing of these, and of the meat and fish and fowl dishes he
drools over, very much resembles Walter de Bibbesworth's Tretiz, a manual for
teaching French to young people in England so they could fit into the upper
classes, who spoke French. (10) In one of the poems copied into Harley 2253,
Urbain le Courtois (ff. 112r-113v), the courtly Urbain advises his son that while
he is of young and tender age, his father wants him to have the best noreture
("breeding"), and to that end, Urbain says (f. 1 12r, col. iii, 15-20):
Je vueil tot al primour
que sages seiez e plein de doucour.
Seiez debonere e corteis,
e que vous sachez parler fraunceis
quar molt es langage alosee
de gentil houme e molt amee

I want, first of all,


that you be sensible and very kindly.
Be well-behaved and courteous,
and you must learn to speak French,
for the language is very highly esteemed
by gentlefolk, and much loved.

A final and perhaps the most important point about this poem is that when
this Goliard refers to three seasons of the Christian year, it is always and only in
terms of what dishes he wants to be gourmandizing in each holy season. He speaks
of Christmas (line 65), of Lent (line 1 1 1), and of Easter (136). No medieval reader
could have missed the irony of this glutton's making sacred feasts into secular
gluttony. This irony the scribe has foregrounded by copying A Goliard's Feast
into his manuscript on a page (f. 55r) facing the end of the Vita Sancti Ethelberti
(f. 54v), and overleaf from the Harrowing of Hell (f. 55v). The final lines of the
Vita describe how, in the dark of the third night after Ethelbert was martyred, his
ghost appeared in a brilliant light to a certain man named Brythfrid, and
commanded him to go to Ethelbert' s sepulture, take up the corpse, and bring it to
Hereford for burial there. As Brythfrid and a companion were bearing the corpse
to Hereford, a certain blind man, not knowing who were passing, cried out, "O
Ethelbert, servant of god, help me!" and straightway received his sight the first
of many miracles at the tomb, around which Hereford Cathedral was built.
Consider, then, the scribe's handiwork on folios 54v and 55r: having
finished copying this sacred narrative, in which a saint's corpse and spirit shine
forth into the darkness the brilliant light of holiness, and a blind man receives his
sight, the scribe turns to the facing page and copies the monologue of a glutton in
darkness, thinking of a smokeless wood-fire for his hearth: a sensualist for whom
the sacred feasts of the Church, and the festivals of its saints, are merely occasions
for gluttony or, as Chaucer's Pardoner put it, Wombe is his God, "the Belly is
his God". Yet the scribe then turns the leaf and copies The Harrowing of Hell, the
story of how Christ, having suffered shame and dreadfully painful death for

A GOLIARD '5 FEAST AND THE METANARRATIVE OF HARLEY 2253

847

sinners like the Goliard, went down to Hell and took from the clutches of Satan the
souls of all the righteous dead.
This surely is not a scribe working only to copy neatly, or haphazardly
choosing and randomly placing the texts he has chosen. This is certainly, as Neil
Ker long ago showed, "an educated scribe" one who showed even in small
details that he was highly educated and extremely careful in what he wrote. The
telling detail Ker used to show it, is that in a hundred and eighty pages of his work,
the scribe only once wrote out the name of Jesus with an h:
The scribe wrote 'ihesu' at f. 49 / 29. Elsewhere the word, if written in full, is without the h.
By the fourteenth century the spelling without the h is uncommon and the sign of an
educated scribe. Most scribes appear to have been ignorant of what grammarians like
Huguitio and Brito had said about the value of the h in the abbreviation of iesus (Ker : 1964,
p. XIX).
Who, then, might this educated, precise, and very intelligent scribe have been?
We know he was a Ludlow-area literary and legal scrivener and
conveyancer, because 41 legal deeds in his handwriting have been identified, each
internally dated and located, all written in or within a few miles of Ludlow over
the years from December 1314 to April 1349. We may also with some confidence
infer that he was a chaplain, because he also owned (and copied items into) BL
MS Harley 273, which contains a Psalter in French made for use in Ludlow, as
well as the Manuel des Pchs, of which he copied the final portion in 1314-15.
The Manuel was a handbook such as episcopal constitutions prescribed, providing
doctrinal and sermon materials needed by parish priests in teaching, preaching, and
confessional work, and it is reasonable to infer that the scribe was a household and
perhaps a parish chaplain; certain items he copied into Harley 273, for instance,
suggest that he was trained in hearing confessions. (9)
A legal scrivener and chaplain needed to know (and might have taught)
French and Latin, and Harley 2253 looks like a trilingual book that the scribe, as
such a household chaplain, compiled to use both for entertainment and for teaching
and devotional uses. He could well have included the Goliard' s Feast both to
delight and to teach, which might be why it so much resembles Bibbesworth's
Tretiz, which Friar Herebert had included in his own trilingual preaching-andteaching anthology, Additional 46919. As Rothwell says (1990, p. 1),
Bibbesworth's Tretiz was written in order to provide anglophone landowners in late
thirteenth-century England with French vocabulary appertaining to the management of their
estates in a society where French and Latin, but not yet English, were the accepted
languages of record. The terminology... is limited to the sphere of country life and pursuits,
(9) (Revard : 2000b), with plates of 41 dated legal documents in this scribe's hand, whose
changes of handwriting from 1314 to 1349 allow us to date his work on the Manuel des Pchs to
the years 1314-15.

848

CARTER REV ARD


although the author's predilection for using homynyms... often brings into his exposition
terms outside the strict limits of this single register.

We may add that the acquisition of French was important not merely for the
practical and administrative management of estates, but for climbing the social
ladder, an aspect very well illustrated by the careers of the Paston family for
instance, of William Paston II (1436-1476), whose Memorandum on French
Grammar from his time as student at Cambridge survives. Acquiring further lands
and fees, rising to serve as trustee and administrator for nobles, marrying up
(William married a daughter of the Duke of Somerset), and advancing his family's
fortunes and status, all were very closely connected with his learning the French
language in which were conducted much of the business and pleasure of the
nobility and gentry, and therefore of the lawyers who aspired to and sometimes
reached the status and wealth of gentry and even nobility. William flourished a
hundred years later than did the Harley 2253 scribe, but the Paston family's
careers, including their book-ownership and reading, are relevant to that of the
scribe of Harley 2253. Books owned, borrowed, and acquired by the Pastons show
that a book like Harley 2253 might have been prized by such a Ludlow-area family
in the 1330s and 1340s. (10)
As for the verbal closeness of Bibbesworth's Tretiz to the Goliard's Feast,
that may be illustrated by the passage in which Bibbesworth is providing the
learner with terms for weather, when he writes of winter (Herebert's copy in Add.
46919 f. 8v col. 2, with his ME glosses):
freyd est de yuer lorre
un deumayl vous est moustre
En yuer quant lorre chaunge
& le temps deuient si estrange,
& a maint home fait fort endurer
Pur le destroit del yuer
kaunt en yuer lorre chaunge
vn verge creest estraunge
verge saunz verdour
Saunz foille & saunz flour
kaunt vendre Teste,
La verge ne ert ia troue.
Red me thys redles, what may hyt bee?
Ceo est un esclarril en fraunceys,
On yszikel en engleys.

[ME gloss: the eyr ofwynter i.e,. l'aure]


[ME gloss: a redles]
[ME gloss: dreiheri]
When winter's air doth change
a verge groweth strange,
a verge without greenery,
with neither flower nor leafery
but when summer comes around,
the verge is no longer found.

(10) (Davis and Ivy : 1962) and (Davis : 1971, pp. 150-153). As for books among the Pastons, in
June 1472 John Paston HI (writing to his brother, Sir John) mentions that the Earl of Arran is
staying in London at the George Inn in Lombard Street, and has a book belonging to John's sister
Anne: "He hath a book of my syster Annys of the Sege of Thebes. When he hathe doon wyth it he
promysyd to delyuer it yow. I preye yow lete Portlond brynge the book horn wyth hym. Portlond is
loggyd at the George in Lombard Stret also," and in July 1472 John writes again to complain that
their mother's priest James Gloys "seyth that ye comandyd hym to delyueer the book of vij Sagys
to my brodyr Water, and he hath it" (Davis : 1971, pp. 575 and 576).

A GOLIARD 'S FEAST AND THE METANARRATIVE OF HARLEY 2253

849

In his Tretiz, Bibbesworth often uses humor as a teaching aid, and here he uses the
device of a riddle posed in Middle English to make sure his students learn the
French word esclarril for the English word icicle. He is also fond of pointing out
homophones and homonyms, and having some fun with what happens when
learners make mistakes with these. He makes play for instance with the verb
tonner, "thunder," and in the Goliard's soliloquy we find a couplet rhyming
the verb form tonne "thunders" and the noun tonne, "wine-cask" in both Bern
cod. 354 (11. 54-5) and Harley 2253 (11. 84-5), which seems adapted from
Bibbesworth.
Harley 2253, the household book that the scribe designed, is wide-ranging,
in the tradition of the Disciplina Clericalis, with its texts similarly arranged in sic
et non fashion so as to "define" each other by dialectic opposition ,(n) He chose,
and sequenced, texts that cover a wide spectrum of themes, genres, forms, in Latin,
French, and Middle English: political protest and social satire, amorous and
religious lyrics and contrafacta, devotional and didactic materials, saints' lives and
fabliaux, debates, the romance of King Horn, prophecy, dream-interpretations, a
travel guide to the Holy Land with notes on how visits to certain places can
shorten the pilgrim's time in Purgatory. The portion in this scribe's hand begins
with an ABC pour les femmes, and clearly the anthology was made for women as
well as men. A Goliard's Feast is surely a comic/ didactic piece a selfsatirizing monologue that, catchy and memorizable, is a great device for teaching
household French. It seems meant both to teach and to delight, as is the book that
contains it. This was an intellectually alert and vigorous household of sophisticated
tastes.
As for when the scribe copied A Goliard's Feast and other texts into Harley
2253, by comparison with his dated legal deeds, A Goliard's Feast (and most of
Harley 2253) appears to have been written about 1340. Besides Harley 2253 and
Harley 273, a third manuscript compiled and in large part copied by him is known:
BL MS Royal 12.C.X, one of whose interesting Anglo-Norman texts is the
"ancestral romance" of Fouke le Fitz Waryn, copied in two stints, the first about
1326-30, the second in the late 1330s or early 1340s (12). Harley 273, which he had
acquired by 1315, is primarily a chaplain-preacher's handbook, adapted (as its
Calendar shows) for use in Ludlow, and the fact that its Psalter is in French
(11) This point is important in considering the scribe's siting of texts in the whole manuscript.
For dialectic opposition see (Revard : 2000b), (Nolan : 2000), and (Cooper : 1997); particularly apt
are lines quoted by Nolan (p. 292, n. 8) from Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose 21543-552. The
doctrine that we know everything by knowing its contrary was a commonplace, as we may see in
Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde when Pandarus expounds it to Troilus (Book 1, lines 624-45): see
(Benson : 1987), p. 482 and notes pp. 1028-29. This doctrine/ principle controls, I think, the
sequencing of texts in such anthologies as Harley 2253 and the Canterbury Tales. For Disciplina
Clericalis: (Tolan : 1993), pp. 73-91, 132-162.
(12) For facts in this paragraph see (Revard : 2000b), pp. 65-73.

850

CARTER REV ARD

suggests he was a secular chaplain, rather than a monk or friar who would
presumably have wanted it in Latin. Besides its texts for celebrating religious
offices, it also contains (as mentioned above) the Manuel des Pchs, a book made
for parish priests and chaplains to use in preaching, hearing confessions, and
teaching the faith to parishioners. But it contains, further, a copy of the Household
Rules written by Bishop Grosseteste for the Countess of Lincoln as a guide to
management of a large noble household and demesne a text useful for a clericchaplain who aspired to becoming the Steward of such a household, for which the
legal and accounting skills of this scribe (evidence of which we see in his 41 legal
charters) might have fitted him.
Although both Harley 273 and Royal 12.C.X, like Harley 2253, are
trilingual, with a similarly wide range of texts, they are not the same kind of
anthology. Harley 273, as above remarked, is a a chaplain-preacher-lawyer's book.
In Royal 12.C.X, the assemblage of diverse texts can be seen to fall into separate
booklets, but overall these seem to have been acquired or copied by accretion
rather than arranged in planned sequences. The texts, not all in this scribe's hand,
were acquired over some years as wholes or in blocks, and those copied by this
scribe fall more or less haphazardly into miscellaneous "piles." Royal 12.C.X, in
other words, looks like a kind of commonplace book, the scribe's personal
miscellany of material useful or interesting to him at various times in his life and
career. Until recently, his third book, Harley 2253, was judged by editors and
critics to be much the same kind of miscellany. (13) His arrangement of Harley
2253, however, must be understood as not a miscellany, nor even a neat anthology
of variegated materials, but a work carefully arranged and neatly planned,
comparable to the Disciplina Clericalis, the Decameron, or the Canterbury Tales,
lacking only the frame scheme that would have made this obvious to the scholars
who have failed to see it: in those folios copied by this scribe (ff. 49-140), he
clearly has so placed his texts that they tacitly "comment on" and "change the
meanings of' each other, as can be shown by looking closely at almost any
sequence of texts, whether or not they are in the same quire. The analogy would be
to two chemical elements sodium and chlorine, for instance. Separately, sodium
(13) An excellent reception-history of Harley 2253 is found in (Fein : 2000), pp. 1-15. Stemmler
(2000) concludes (p. 113): "Harley 2253 is neither a miscellany a somewhat arbitrary, casual
collection of texts nor a well-wrought book carefully made up of mutually corresponding parts.
Rather, it is an anthology, a careful collection selected as representative specimens of various
genres." See, for further discussion, (Revard : 1982), and the other essays cited in note 2 above,
which demonstrate more juxtaposing and networking in the manuscript than Stemmler allows for.
More recently, other scholars are recognizing that Harley 2253 is a special kind of anthology: see
The Yearbook of English Studies, 33 (2003) for five essays on pp. 1-79: (Taylor : 2003), (Scahill :
2003), (Cartlidge : 2003), (O'Rourke : 2003), and (Corrie : 2003). Most recently, in a essay
published after the present one was completed, Lerer (2003) has cited my work and applied it to a
discussion of Harley 2253 as anthology (see esp. pp. 1255-1259 and notes 8 and 9, p. 1265).

A GOLIARD 'S FEAST AND THE METANARRATIVE OF HARLEY 2253

851

is a highly active, combustible, poisonous metal, while chlorine is a deadly gas


but together they are sodium chloride, common table salt, essential to life, giving
food its savor.
The Ludlow area in 1300-1350 was well suited to a sophisticated household
with readers who could appreciate such a book. The town and region were a
resonating chamber for national and international crises, many of whose actors
were persons from the area: courtly nobles, notably Mortimers and Talbots of
Richard's Castle, FitzWarins of Shropshire and Hampshire, LeStranges of
Herefordshire and Shropshire, FitzAlan earls of Arundel, and Roger Mortimer of
Wigmore, first earl of March; high-status clerics, especially the bishops of
Hereford Adam Orleton and Thomas Charlton who were royal administrators for
Edward II and Edward III; friars, monks and hospital clergy, chaplains and
lawyers and household priests; and wealthy wool-merchants / franklins helping to
fund the start of the Hundred Years' War. One of the scribe's likely patron
families, the Ludlows of Stokesay, rose in the period 1294-1314 from mercantile
to knightly and castled status: the Patent Rolls show that in the 1260s Nicholas
Ludlow was Prince Edward's merchant and in 1272-94 Nicholas' son Laurence
was merchant for Edward I; Laurence drowned in 1294 while taking the King's
wool to Flanders. His son Sir William Ludlow became lord of Hodnet Castle and
honorary Steward of Montgomery Castle in right of his wife Matilda Hodnet; Sir
William's son, Sir Laurence, and grandson Sir John, fought as knights in Scotland
and France for Edward III. The Ludlows of Stokesay had ties to baronial Marcher
families, especially the FitzWarins, the LeStranges, and the FitzAlan earls of
Arundel. They were therefore not friendly, during the period 1322-30, with Roger
Mortimer of Wigmore, Queen Isabella's lover and the first Earl of March, who
held Ludlow Castle until he was hanged in 1330, but they may have been on good
terms with Roger's widow Joan, their son Edmund, and their grandson Roger, who
were important figures in Ludlow; the grandson Roger was raised at court, fought
at Crcy, became a Garter Knight as well as second Earl of March, and had a
generally stellar career. In short, Ludlow had clerics, courtiers, nobles, gentry and
bourgeoisie who moved in courtly circles on national affairs, traveled to the
Continent including Avignon, and moved much around England on matters of
legal, courtly, and clerical business. (14)
This mobility is the more interesting since, as Mary Dove has pointed out, A
Goliard's Feast circulated on the Continent as well as in England, while another
AN text found only in Harley 2253, the ABC des femmes, has a ME avatar in the
Auchinleck Manuscript, compiled and copied in London c. 1327-40, thus almost

(14) Spatial limits prevent documentation here on these families and their roles in local and
national history. See (Hines : 2004) for much detail on the Ludlows of Stokesay.

852

CARTER REVARD

precisely contemporary with Harley 2253. (15) Consider, also, that other texts
copied into Harley 2253 circulated not only within the SWMidlands but far
beyond: England, Ireland, and France. Its Anglo-Norman Lament for Simon de
Montfort turns up in an Irish Franciscan manuscript (Trinity College Dublin MS
347); other Anglo-Norman devotional and didactic texts found in Harley 2253,
Royal 12.C.X, and Harley 273 resemble those in a manuscript linked to Waterford
in Ireland, Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 405 (studied by K. V. Sinclair,
without noting resemblances); Harley 2253' s Latin/ French Against the King's
Taxes is found in a Cistercian cartulary (alongside copied charters, some
contemporary with Harley 2253) from Whalley Abbey in Ribblesdale; a macaronic
poem (titled Proverbia Trifaria in the edition of Isabel Aspin) copied by the
Harley 2253 main scribe into the first quire of BL MS Royal 12.C.X is found also
in another Irish manuscript, Trinity College Dublin MS 517; the Irish Franciscan
MS Harley 913, of c. 1330 A.D., contains ME analogues and textual overlaps; and
not only did A Goliard's Feast, in a Continental French version from early 14C,
circulate in France, but so did some of the Harley 2253 fabliaux (16). Further, as
(15) See (Dove : 2000, p. 331 and note 10). The AN and ME texts are printed side by side in
(Holthausen : 1902), and discussed by Mary Dove (1970, pp. 50-60). She prints the two texts
pp. 95-102. For the ME text see (Pearsall and Cunningham : 1977), item 42, fols. 324-5, (Hanna :
2000) and (Turville-Petre : 1996), pp. 108-41. The Auchinleck compiler's inclusion of an ME
version of the Anglo-Norman ABC des femmes (itself uniquely extant in Harley 2253) shows not
only that the poem circulated between Ludlow and London (where Auchinleck was copied), but
that the ME translator knew and used the very diction of the Harley Lyrics: compare, for instance,
the first surviving line of the Auchinleck ME, Bot fais men make herfingres fold with Ribblesdale
55 (fyngres heo hathfeir tofolde), with the Old Man's Prayer 21 (Nou y may no fynger fold) and
1. 40 (ant mey no fynger felde); and with Blow Northern Wind 23 (ant fyngres feyre forte folde). See
(Franklin : 1986). Whoever translated Harley's AN ABC into Auchinleck's ME worked in the same
poetic milieu, using the same lexical and phrasal repertoire, as did the composer(s) of the "Harley
Lyrics"; and the London and WMidl scribes were clearly in touch with each other. A full study of
relations between Auchinleck's texts and those gathered by the scribe of Harley 2253, including
those in his other two books, BL MSS Harley 273 and Royal 12.C.xii, would illuminate the
London / Ludlow literary circuit.
(16) See (Shields : 1972); for Trinity College Dublin MS 347 see (Colker : 1991, pp. 710-740.
That the Whalley Abbey (Cistercian) cartulary contains a copy of Against the King's Taxes was
pointed out in 1986 by J. R. Maddicott; see (Scattergood : 2000, esp. pp. 163-169). For the
macaronic poem in Royal 12.C.xii, see (Aspin : 1953), and for the newly discovered version of it in
TCD 517 see (Pope : 1981). For MS Harley 913, besides (Cartlidge : 2003), see (Lucas : 1995),
who confirms that Harley 913 is probably of Franciscan provenance, linked to the towns of
Waterford and of New Ross. One text in Harley 913 that resembles the Harley 2253 Goliard's
Feast is the 190-line The Land of Cockaygne (pp. 46-55), and in her notes (pp. 174-180), Lucas
cites clues that this poem's English-speaking author "had access to literary sources in English,
French, and Latin," such as the 13C French fabliau of Cocagne (presumably that in Paris, BN fr.
837), and references to an abbas Cucaniensis in the drinking songs of the Carmina Burana, as well
as to the twelfth century Confessio of Golias himself. For Irish circulation of Anglo-Norman texts,
and their gathering into a manuscript linked to Waterford in Ireland, see (Sinclair : 1984). Sinclair
notes of CCCC 405 (p. 222): "some volumes, once separate entities, may well have been originally

A GOLIARD 'S FEAST AND THE METANARRATIVE OF HARLEY 2253

853

detailed study by Frances McSparran has confirmed, ME texts in Harley 2253


came from all over England, as their ME dialects show (McSparran : 2000). We
would be much mistaken, then, to think that Harley 2253 was only a set of rare
pieces in a cultural cul-de-sac.
As for the literacy its scribe must have expected of his readers, three
instances may be briefly cited. Consider, first, the final stanza in one of the bestknown of the ME "Harley Lyrics," Annote and John. Annote, the lady who has
been praised in the poem's earlier stanzas, is presented as a healer, someone with
powers as magical and helpful as those of the gems, flowers, medical plants and
remedies to which she is compared, (see Revard : 1999) Then its final stanza
compares her to nine heroines and heroes of Welsh, French, and Germanic
romances (25 17). The audience of this lyric were therefore expected to know a very
copied in the South- West of England and later conveyed to Waterford where they subsequently fell
into the hands of the Knights Hospitaller"; he notes that Herebert's Additional 46919 is part of the
Franciscan mix and dimensions of the manuscript milieu (p. 229, n. 56). To Sinclair's discussion
we may add, first, that at least one scribal hand in CCCC 405 is precisely contemporary with and
writes a cursive legal script much resembling that of the main scribe of Harley 2253; and second, as
just mentioned, there is significant overlap between some texts this hand copied into CCCC 405
and some copied by the main scribe of Harley 2253 into that or the two others which he assembled,
owned over a long period, and partly copied: BL MSS Harley 273 and Royal 12C.xii. Moreover,
the scribe copied into CCCC 405 legal documents just like those which the main scribe of Harley
2253 produced in his work as legal scrivener. Further discussion of this overlap is reserved to a
separate study.
(17) Brown (1932, pp. 226-228) identifies the poet's Rgnas (1. 42) as Ragna, the wise woman of
the Orkneyingers Saga, and Tegeu (1. 43) as one of three chaste ladies, one of the three fair ladies
of King Arthur's court, wife of Caradoc who saved him from a serpent that had fastened itself upon
him, and owner of one of the Thirteen Treasures of the Isle of Britain which fell into the possession
of Merlin a magical mantle which would not serve any woman who had violated her marriage or
her virginity. Wyrwein (1. 43) he suggests is Garwen or Earrwen, one of three mistresses of King
Arthur in the Mabinogion; Byrne (1. 44) may be Bjorn of the Orkneyingers Saga; Wylcadoun (1. 45)
is perhaps Guilliadun, "the princess who became enamoured of Eliaduc" in Marie de France's Lai
d'Eliduc. Ffloyres (1. 46) may be the lady Floripas in Sir Ferumbras, whose magic girdle
"exempted all who wore it from the effects of hunger and thirst"; Cradoc (1. 47 is the knight who
only, at Arthur's court (having a chaste wife), was able to carve the boar's head; Hilde (1. 48), of
the ThidriL Saga,was daughter of King Artus of Bretangenland; and Jonas (1. 50) may be Jonaans,
the son of King Celidoine of Scotland who went to Wales and married a daughter of King Moroneu
and who in Lestoire del Saint Graal is described as cheualiers preus et hardi, et essouchera
moult sainte glise. See, further, (Matonis : 1988) and (Saint Paul : 1992), who traces Tegeu back
into the Welsh Triads and the French Livre de Caradoc.
Borrowing of romances by ladies and knights at court is documented by (Vale : 1982,
pp. 48-50), citing the 1322-41 "roll of issues and receipts from the privy wardrobe at the Tower"
that is now BL Add. MS 60584; see, further, (Revard : 1997). In 1327, clerics and agents of four
great ladies three co-heiresses to Gilbert Clare, Earl of Gloucester, and the fourth their older
half-sister were given religious service-books and romances: Elizabeth Clare de Burgh received
four romances; her sister Margaret, Countess of Cornwall, widow of Piers Gaveston, also got four
romances; their older half-sister Isabella, widow of Maurice Berkeley, received six romances; and
their cousin Margaret, widow of Bartholomew de Badlesmere, was given two romances. Knights at

854

CARTER REVARD

wide range of romances and recognize at once the names of their central figures.
They held, as it were, baccalaureate degrees in European literature, while the
scribe though apparently but a minor lawyer was a highly educated cleric
whose trilingual anthology shows that the Ludlovian audience in his household
were au courant with the best contemporary and recent poetry in French and
English.
A second instance of such literacy (as Professor Keith Busby has pointed out to
me) is found in the scribe's Anglo-Norman redaction of a fabliau that was popular
on the Continent, Le chevalier qui fist les cons parler (18). In Harley 2253, but not
in any of the Continental versions, there is a parodie allusion to Sire Elyas (or Sire
Elyot) and his boat, which apparently is meant to evoke the Chevalier au
Cygne the Swan Knight and his boat, in the Old French Crusade Cycle: that is,
the scribe expected the audience of a bawdy fabliau to catch and be amused by this
glancing parodie reference to a chanson de geste (19)
And finally, as third instance, this scribe made sure to include a range of
historical poems so that his anthology's readers would be well versed in recent and
contemporary history just as Richard Firth Green has shown courtiers were
supposed to be (20). Harley 2253, once we read it as this scribe made it to be read,
court were also handed liturgical and didactic books and romances: Sir Thomas Wake of Liddell
had three romances (two covered in white leather, one in red); John de Bohun, Earl of Hereford,
got a Brut in Latin and one romance; the two executors of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, got three
romances (and one Bestiary); Sir John Montgomery had two romances; and Sir Roger Swinerton
received four romances. Queen Isabella herself borrowed nine books, one being Renart, another
Raoul de Houdenc's Le Roman de Mraugis de Portlesguez, a third the Romance of Perceval. She
also borrowed a French translation of the Old Testament, another of Vegetius' On the Art of War,
and what may have been Wace's Le Roman de Rou. See (Green : 1980) on literacy at court: the
evidence of Harley 2253 points to such literacy also among some lesser households.
(18) (Noomen et van den Boogaard : 1986), pp. 45-173, 412-29; and (Short and Pearcy : 2000),
pp. 25-28.
(19) (Mickel and Nelson : 1977 and 1985). Volume II provides an essay by Geoffrey M. Myers
on the manuscripts of the Old French Crusade Cycle, in which he points out (pp. XLVIII-LII) that
British Library MS Additional 36615, though "executed by several scribes at the end of the
thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century, possibly in South Normandy", contains on fol.
83v a charm against illness in French prose that is "written in a characteristic English hand of the
first quarter of the fourteenth century" and on f. 164v what may be this same hand has written
"some advice on a herbal stimulant" and a different hand has written in what may be a scrap of the
Riote du monde that could be related to another text in Harley 2253, Le roi et le Jongleur d'Ely.
(20) Green (1980, pp. 71-100), examines books, literacy, and reading practices in courts and
noble households. Useful discussion of the political poems in Harley 2253 is found in
(Scattergood : 2000), but though he examines their relation to historical events he does not observe
that the scribe has so placed them within the anthology's dialectic as to re-configure our
understanding of them. I have discussed this reconfiguring of political meanings in (Revard : 2001)
as also in (Revard : 1998), and in papers being revised toward publication: "Protest Poems of 12641349: Scribe, Patrons, and Social/ Literary Milieu" (32nd International Congress on Medieval
Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 11, 1998), "The Political Poems of MS Harley 2253 and the

A GOLIARD 'S FEAST AND THE METANARRATIVE OF HARLEY 2253

855

brings us into a bower with people whose courtly, devout, and earthy
conversations would have been enjoyed by Chaucer, or Langland, or the Pearl Poet
and, I suggest, were enjoyed by clerics and courtiers, merchants and franklins
and lawyers, friars and nuns and monks, who were living in, doing business in, or
passing through the Ludlow area from 1314 to 1349.

2.
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Text Society, "Plain Text Series, 6", 1990).
Rychner (Jean), "Deux Copistes au travail: Pour une tude textuelle globale du
manuscrit 354 de la Bibliothque de la Bourgeoisie de Berne", in (Short :
1984), pp. 187-218.
SAINT PAUL (Thrse), "A Forgotten Heroine in Medieval English Literature",
in DOR (Juliette), ed. A Wyf Ther was: Essays in Honour of Paule
Mertens-Fonck (Lige : L3, 1992), pp. 247-255.
Sc AHILL (John), "Trilingualism in Early Middle English Miscellanies: Languages
and Literature", The Yearbook ofEnglish Studies, 33 (2003), pp. 18-32.

858

CARTER REVARD

SCATTERGOOD (John), "Authority and Resistance: the Political Verse", in (Fein :


2000), pp. 163-202.
Shields (H.), "The Lament for Simon de Montfort: an Unnoticed Text of the
French Poem", Medium JEvum, 41 (1972), pp. 202-207.
SHORT (Ian), ed. Medieval French Textual Studies in Memory of T. B. W. Reid
(London : "Anglo-Norman Text Society Occasional Publications Series, I",
1984).
SHORT (Ian) and Pearcy (Roy), eds. Eighteen Anglo-Norman Fabliaux (London :
Anglo-Norman Text Society, "Plain Text Series, 14", 2000),
Sinclair (K. V.), "Anglo-Norman at Waterford: the Mute Testimony of MS
Cambridge C.C.C.405", in (Short : 1984), pp. 219-38.
STEMMLER (Theo), "Miscellany or Anthology? The Structure of Medieval
Manuscripts: MS Harley 2253, for Example", in (Fein : 2000), pp. 1 1 1-121.
Taylor (Andrew), "Manual to Miscellany: Stages in the Continental Copying of
Vernacular Literature in England", The Yearbook of English Studies, 33
(2003), pp. 1-17.
TOLAN (John), Petrus Alfonsi and his Medieval Readers (Gainesville, Florida:
University Press of Florida, 1993).
TSCHANN (Judith) and PARKES (. .), Facsimile of Oxford, Bodleian Library,
MSDigby 86, EETS s.s. 16 (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1996).
TURVILLE-PETRE (Thorlac), England The Nation (Oxford : Clarendon Press,
1996).
Vale (Juliet), Edward III and Chivalry (Woordbrigde, Suffolk : Boydell Press,
1982).
WRIGHT (Thomas), Specimens of Lyric Poetry, Temp. Edw. I (London : Percy
Society, 1842).

3.
Texts and translation: La Devise aus Lecheors (Bern, Burgerbibliothek
cod. 354, ff. 112v-114r) and Goliard's Feast (BL MS Harley 2253, f. 55r)
Bern, cod. 354 (OF)
(fol. 1 12v, col. 2, 1. 24)
1] Qant H douz tans se remue,
When the good weather's gone
Que je voi la venue
so that I see the coming
D'iv(er) qui si m'argue,
of winter which so oppresses me,
Lors ai(n) buche fandue (21)

Harley 2253 (Anglo-Norman)


(fol. 55r, cols. 1-2)
1] Quant voy la reuenue
When I see the return
d'yuer, qe si me argue
of Winter, which so makes me feel
qe ly temps se remue,
that the weather's changing,
lors aym buche fendue,

(21) The MS reading is, I believe, fandue, though Mon prints fendue.

A GOLIARD'S FEAST AND THE METANARRATIVE OF HARLEY 2253


5]

10]

15]

20]

25]

then I love a split log,


Charbon clicant,
the coals clicking,
Tison flanbant,
firebrand flaming,
Feu d'ecoche mossue:
mossy stump ablaze,
(fol. 11 3t, col. 1 line 1)
De joie en chant.
for joy I sing of it
Dex! je l'ain tant,
my God! I love it so,
Cuer et cors m'esvertue.
heart and body grow strong.
Qant vient au cochier,
When I go to bed,
Certes m(ou)lt m 'agree
what greatly pleases me's
Fomille en fagot,
hearth with faggot
Soiche sanz fumee,
dry and smokeless,
Qui tost m'esprant
which brightens everything
Et brese rant (23).
and turns to embers.
Et je rai de grant moult sovant
And I scratch very often
Lo piz et l'eschinee
my chest and back,
Car la char bien paiie
for the flesh really stinks
E de dras mal vestue.
and it's badly clothed.
Ne quiert autre jornee,
I long for another day
Et por la chalor sue
when by the heat pursued
Tant que hors est issue,
so much, the cold's kicked out
La froidure est alee,
and is gone away,
C'est deliz
There's great delight
de boens liz

859

then I love a split log,


5] charboun clykant,
the coals clicking,
tysoun flambaunt,
firebrand flaming,
feu de souche meisue (22)
mossy trunk ablaze,
de ioie chaunt
I sing for joy,
quar ie l'eym tant,
for I love it so,
1 0] tot le cors me tressue.
I sweat from head to toe.
Quant vient acochier,
When I go to bed,
certes molt me agree
what greatly pleases me's
fagot en fournil
a faggot in the hearth
secche sauntz fumee,
dry and smokeless,
15] qe tost esprent
which brightens everything,
e brese rent.
and turns to embers.
E je me degrat molt souent
and I scratch very often
le pys e l'eschyne,
both chest and back,
quar la char bien pue
for the flesh really stinks
e de draps mal vestue.
and it's badly clothed.
Aym molt la Jrne,
I do love the morning,
quar quant pur chalour se sue
for when by heat pursued the cold
taunt qe fors soit issue
is chased out of doors
la freydour e alee,
and is gone away,
25] ceo est moun dlit
it's my delight
de auer beau lit

(22) Wright prints meis ne, which does not make sense; the scribe split the word, writing meis at
the end of 1. 4, and ue at the beginning of 1. 5. Bern cod. 354 mossue ("mossed") clarifies: the
ecoche (f. 1 12v, final word) is a mossy log or stump a "Yule Log"? Harley 2253 readers would
have understood that the split word was meisue, "mossy".
(23) MS & brese rant.rant; Mon prints Et brese rent.

860

30]

35]

40]

45]

CARTER REV ARD


in a splendid bed
De dras blanchis
its blanched linen
Qui sevent la buee.
fresh from the laundry.
Tainte coverture
A dirty coverlet
C'est desconfiture;
is misery,
Lange sanz foreure
clothes without fur lining,
De celui n'ai-je cure,
For that I do not care
Car il n'est preu!
it's so low-class!
Tant ain lou feu
So much I love the fire
Qu[ant] je voi la froidure, (24)
when I see the cold,
A lui me veu.
to that [fire] I'll be heading.
Miauz ain lo feu
I like the fire even better
Que deus dez de tersure!
than two dice fixed for cheating.
Qant je lief a pissier (25)
When I get up to piss
A la matinee,
in the morning,
Certes mult m'est grief,
it really gripes me
Qant voi la fumee
when I see the steam [from my
urine]
Au verreglaz
into icicles
Atorner faz.
is being formed.
Haste menu au broaz (26)
Broiled on a small spit
Del porcel mall o[s]tee

to have a splendid bed,


de dras blaunchys
its blanched linen
fleyre la buee.
fragrant with laundry-steam.
La tenue couerture
A thin coverlet
30] c'est ma desconfiture;
is my misery;
lange sauntz foreure
clothes without fur lining,
de celi n'ai-je cure,
for that I do not care
quar il n'est preuz
it's so low-class!
Mieux aym les feus:
I love the fire still better
35] quant ie voy la refroidure,
when I see cold return,
a ly m'en vou.
to that I'll be heading.
Mieux aym son iou
I like its play still better
qe dous deez detorsure!
than two dice fixed for cheating!
Quant l'yuer s'esteynt
When winter's quenched
40] par la matynee
by the morning
certes molt me greuee
it really pains me
lanoyfe la gelee
the snow and rime
mes en verglaz
into icicles
atourner faz.
are being formed.
45] Menues hastes en bruaz
On small spits for broiling
de pourcel madle ostee

(24) MS Q, which Mon expands in the usual way as Que. The Bern scribe usually abbreviates
Qui or Que (lines 15, 28, 35, 38, 53, 54), but writes out Quant (lines 1,11, 39, 42, 55, 57, 63, 76).
Harley's Quant gives better sense, however.
(25) LI. 39-44 of Bern cod. 354 differ much from 11. 39-44 of Harley 2253. Perhaps the Harley
scribe's redaction was made for teaching French to a "PG-13" audience; Bibbesworth's Tretiz
refers to les enfauntz whom his manual is made for.
(26) OF bruaz, bruillaz, brou[i\llaz "mist, fog," in OFD does not make sense here; nor does
bruaz "fog," in AND. My translation desperately assumes that Bern's broaz and Harley's bruaz
come from the verb bruiller in the sense "broil" (AND), for which the OFD gives the form brusler.

A GOLIARD'S FEAST AND THE METANARRATIVE OF HARLEY 2253


some boar-meat's roasted
Prise en une pasture,
taken in a good pasturage
La longe sans arsure,
the loin uncharred,
Tote ai ma teneure
I've given all my possessions
50] Por bon morsel donee
for a choice helping,
Por boen more
for one good bite,
Por fort raspez
for strong table-wine,
Que je ain miauz assez
that I love much more
54] Que cervoise enfume.
than smoke-tinged beer.
[For lines 55-80, see below, after
line 108]

82] Taverne ai moult amee,


I've loved the tavern well,
N'est pas droit que la hee,
no reason I should hate it
Tote ai m'amore donee
I gave my whole heart to
85] A savor destranpee
that well-spiced brew
De garingal,
with galingale,
De citoal,
with zedoary,
Et en chaude pevree
and with hot pepper
Ne fait pas mal
and there'd be no harm
90] EntorNoal
around Christmas-time
Mostarde o char salee.
from mustard with salted meat.

861

some boar-meat's roasted


pris en bone pasture,
taken in good pasturage
la loygne sauntz arsure,
the loin unburnt,
en la broche botee,
thrust on the spike,
50] quar c'est ma noreture!
for that's my kind of life!
Tout ay ma tenure
I've given all my holdings for
en bon morsel donee,
one splendid serving,
en bon clare,
with honeyed claret
en fort raspee
and strong table-wine
55] q'eym mieux d'assez
that I love much more
que ceruoyse enfume!
than smoke-tinged beer!
Tauerne ay molt amee,
I've loved the tavern well,
n'est pas droit que la hee,
no reason I should hate it
tout ay m'amour donee
I gave my whole heart to
60] en sauour destempre
that well-spiced brew
en gauigaut (27),
with galingale,
en cetewaut (M),
with zedoary,
mys en chaudee peuere (29)
and with hot pepper, too
ne fet pas mal
and there'd be no harm
65] entour noal
around Christmas-time
mostarde oue char salee.
from mustard with salted meat.

(27) Bern garingal is the standard form for the spice galingale. Harley ganigaut (which might be
read as ganigant, ganigaut, gavigaut or gavigant) is an enigma.
(28) AND gives cedewale, cet-, ce tuai; cetenaud, citon-, "zedoary." Presumably Harley has w for
u. This is the spice called setewall in Middle English texts.
(29) In Piers Plowman, the taverner gives Glutton hot pepper for his drink.

862
Anes, malarz,
Ducks, drakes,
Plu[njon]s et bla[r]ies,
diving ducks and coots,
Chapons, chenevas,
capons, ?woodlarks?,
95] Gelines rosties,
roasted hens,
Grues, harons,
cranes, herons,
Et gente et raille,
wild geese and rails,
Et morillons
and black ducks.
100] Et porcel enfarcie:
and piglet stuffed.
La lange ai moult amee
The loin I've always loved

CARTER REVARD
Oues e madlarz (30),
Wild geese and drakes,
plongons e blaryes (31),
diving ducks and coots,
chapouns, chaneuaus (32),
capons, Twoodlarks?,
70] gelynes rosties,
roasted hens,
cygnes, poons,
swans, peacocks,
cerceles, iauntes
teals, wild geese,
e morillons
and black ducks
75] e purcel enfarcie,
and piglet stuffed.
La loyngne entrelarde
the interlarded loin

(30) MS. Oues; Wright prints Qus, perhaps misled by the rubric slash through capital O, taken
as tail of a Q. Friar William Herebert, in the Tretiz he copied into ff. 2r-14v of London, British
Library MS. Additional 46919, provided glosses in Middle English for many of its Anglo-Norman
words. On f. llr, where Bibbesworth is teaching the names of birds, line 1 reads Ci vient uolaunt
vn ouwe roser, "here comes flying a wild goose," and Herebert has written above vn ouwe its ME
gloss, a wilde gos. (I am grateful to the British Library for providing access to Additional 46919,
and providing a microfilm of it for further study.)
(31) Mon prints Pluvious et blaies but the scribe wrote plunions = OFD plonjon "diver, coot."
In Friar Herebert's Tretiz (n. 30 above), on f. 5r col. 2 (3rd line from bottom) he gives le plounczoun
(where cz represents the voiced alveolar fricative), and glosses it the douke, as he does again on f.
lOv col. 2, 1. 18, where he glosses ane as enede and plounczoun as douke. Reference is thus
probably to a diving duck and not a coot. However, Bern cod. 354 clearly reads blaies, and Harley
2253 reads blaryes, both meaning "coot, moorhen." Yet, Herebert's Bibbesworth (f. llr col. 1,
lines 1-3) reads:
Ci vient uolaunt vn ouwe roser,
[vn ouwe glossed a wilde gos, "a wild goose"
vn blarret a lui acumpaigner,
[v blarret glossed a bernak, "a barnacle goose"
Et mieux serroye de vn blarret pen
[blarret pen glossed bernak ifed, "barnacle
goose's feather" (for a pen?)
que ne serroye de char de fren
[defren glossed of a rok
Perhaps, therefore, we should emend both blaies and blaryes to blarrets "barnacle geese."
(32) (Harley): I cannot decipher either the Bern 354 chenevas or the Harley 2253 chaneuaus/
chauenaus. OFD chanevas, "canvas," could not point here to the duck named "canvasback," which
is a North American species that (says OED) did not get that name until 18th century. My
"woodlarks" is a desperate guess. Could the dish be roasted kid, cheuereaus? Friar Herebert's copy
of Bibbesworth's Tretiz describes vne graunt mangerye (a great feast) that includes a boar's head
and goes on in lines 7-9 and 13-14 (Herebert's ME glosses in brackets):
Des gruwes [cranes] poouns [pecokes] & cynes [swannes]
Cheuereaus [kides] purceaus [pigges] & gelynes
Puis auoient conyns en grauee
ffeisaunz ascyes & perdriz
Gryues alouwes [larken] & plouers rostis.

A GOLIARD 'S FEAST AND THE METANARRATIVE OF HARLEY 2253

105]

109]

55]

58]

60]

65]

(33)
(34)
(35)
(36)

De cerf entrelarde
of a buck in grease:
Veneison ne haz mie (34),
ve not disdained a bit of venison,
Chevroil de dain, [ve]lee
A fallow buck, or veal,
Ne bon ansor botee
nor good ????? put into
En fort poivre flatee
strong peppercorns crushed
Et lo jambon
and a ham
De fresche salaison
just freshly cured
M'a randue la vie.
has saved my life.
[Now here are lines 55-81, set
beside their Harleian versions.]
Qant il pluet et il tonne,
When it rains and thunders,
Et je sui lez la tone,
and I'm beside the cask
Qui totjorz me foisone
which always has plenty for me
Lieute aucun
in some special place
Vin de haute persone
Wine from noble cellar,
C[onine] larde.
a fat rabbit
Fox est qui lo secoue
He's crazy who'd refuse
Fromaiche ros,
a bit of soft cheese
Qant rosti ay,
when I have toasted it,
Et je H faicorone
and I'd make it a crown.
Je ain poi grosillier
I love, then, red-currant
Nuilles et oublees,
little wafers and biscuits
Roisoles, gaufres dores
rissoles, golden waffles.

de ce[rf] (33) ay molt amee.


of a buck I've always loved:
Venesoun ne haz mie,
I've not disdained a bit of venison,
ne char de cerf venee,
nor flesh from the hunted hart
80] ne daym ne porcke, uelee,
or fallow buck, nor pork, veal,
vne pome flestrye.
a dried apple.
Jamboun
Ham
de fresche salesoun
just freshly cured
mi ad rendu la vie.
has saved my life.
85] Quant ie su leez la tonne,
When I'm beside the cask, (??)
e yl ploit e yl tonne,
and it rains and it thunders,
tout adees ma fosoyne
there's always plenty for me
vyn de haute persone,
of high-class wine,
lvre encine, conin larde
chine of hare, a fat rabbit
90] molt est fous qe saonne (35)
he's crazy who'd refuse
formage rees
a bit of soft cheese
quaunt rostie ay,
when I have toasted it,
e ie le faz coroune
and I'd make it a crown.
E pu[i] (36) grosoiller
and then red-currant
95] nuilles e oblees,
little wafers and biscuits,
royssolees e guaffres
rissoles and waffles,
e tostiz doreez.
toasted golden.

MS cele.
Mon prints ne lee, which I cannot make sense of.
OFD saorter, seoner rebut, challenge (a witness, etc.), dismiss (case, court).
MS pur.

863

864

70]

75]

80]

110]

CARTER REVARD
Perdriz, ploviers
Partridge, plover,
Colons, ramiers,
doves and wild pigeons,
Fasans, viecos
pheasants, woodcocks
Boen mangier a,
good eating those,
En endoilles sales!
with salted sausage!
Je tien a fol qui done
I take him for a fool who puts
Son gaje en enprisone
his goods in hock
Por tripes enfumes;
for scorched tripe
Et qant ce vient a none
and when the noon-hour comes,
Mes ostes m'a'raisone:
mine Host has a word with me:
Encontre nuit
to guard against the night
Tot par dduit
all for our delight
Lo chaudun cuit
a hotpot full
En chastaignes pares.
of peeled chestnuts.
[For lines 82-108 see above,
following line 53]
En caresme a Pantree
When Lent is come,
Ain mult perche pare (37),
I really love skinned perch,
Truite et tanche enversee
trout and tench turned over
En souchie gitee,
and thrown into broth.

Perdriz, plouers,
Partridge, plover,
coloms croysers,
pigeons from the dovecote,
100] Le wydecoks est bon mangiers
woodcock's good eating,
e andoilles lardes!
and sausages crisp-fried!
le tienke pur fol qe doune
I take him for a fool who puts
son auer enprisonee
his goods in hock
pur tripes enfumes
for scorched tripe
1 05] quar quaunt reuient a noun
for when I wake at noon
my hoste m'a resoune
mine Host has a word with me
si dit qu'il ad troue
he says that he's just found,
countre la nuyt
to guard against the night
vn chaudon quit
a hotpot full
110] a chasteyn paree.
of peeled chestnuts.
En quaresme a l'entre,
When Lent is come,
lors eym perche paree,
then I love skinned perch,
la tenche enuersee,
a tench turned over,
e en souz botee
immersed in broth.

(37) Lines 112-14 (Harley) and 111-13 (Bern): Two puzzles: first, the lexical meaning of Bern
souchie and Harley souz; second, understanding the culinary actions referred to by enversee in 1111 12 and gitee / botee in 1 12-1 13. Enversee is past participle of enverser "overturn," while gitee
(ppl. of jeter) means "thrown," and botee (ppl of boter) means "pushed, thrust, jostled." The
Goliard describes taking a tench (and, in Bern, a trout), preparing it by splitting it open and gutting,
turning it over, and heaving it into souchie I souz . What is this suchte / souzl AND gives sus'
"juice" and cites a gloss as hec mucida in succiduo: groin de pork en suz; OFD gives as culinary
meaning of souz "pork broth": the Goliard imagines trout or tench cooked in pork broth. But he is
imagining Lenten dishes, so the Menagier de Paris may be pertinent: it cites a broth for cooking
fish which "is like a pork broth (soux)" but whose essential ingredient is sage.

A GOLIARD'S FEAST AND THE METANARRATIVE OF HARLEY 2253

115]

120]

125]

130]
130]

Fresche plaz,
Fresh plaice,
Et poison friz,
and fresh fish
Et enguille salee
with salted eel,
Gastiax rostiz,
toasted wastel-bread
Menuz braz
lightly grilled,
Et flamiche salee.
and Flemish custard-tart with
salt.
[DjarOnehejepas
Dace I don't despise,
Fandu a congnie
split with a hatchet,
Ne enguille de gort,
nor eel from the weir-trap
De sa piau voidie.
peeled from its skin.
Congre n'esturjon,
Conger and sturgeon,
Alose, brame ne gardon,
shad, bream and roach,
Vandoise, letansee,
gudgeon, carp,
Escrivice paree,
crayfish peeled,
Bon foie (42) sor tostee,
good liver on toast,
ne roches, ne lampr,
De roie refroidee
and cold, boiled skate,
Etmasquerel
and mackerel
Fres e novel,
new-caught and fresh,
Et li autre bon morsel
and the other dainty morsels

865

1 1 5] Harang, plays,
Herring, plaice,
e peschoun fresche
and fish that's fresh
e alosee (38) en pastee,
and shad in pastry,
gastieu rostiz,
toasted wastel-bread,
menu brayz,
lightly grilled,
120] e flamiche (39) salee.
and Flemish custard-tart with salt.
Dars ne heez-je mie,
Dace I don't despise,
fenduz de quonie
split with a hatchet
anguille de gors
eel from the weir-trap
de sa pieu veudie.
peeled from its skin.
125] Conger, estorgoun,
Conger and sturgeon,
Luz, salmoun,
pike, salmon,
vendoise (4I), brme, ne gerdon,
gudgeons, bream and roach,
ne morue ou l'aille
cod with garlic,
ne creuice pelle,
crayfish peeled,
roach and lamprey,
ne raye refreide,
and cold.boiled skate,
ly makerel
and mackerel
freshe e nouel,
new-caught and fresh,
et tot cist autre bon morsel
and all those other dainty morsels

(38) AND alose "alosa, shad," or aloser p.p. "renowned, esteemed". Shad in pastry is a common
dish, so reference here is more likely to shad.
(39) ANDflamice, -iche "flawn, custard tart"; OFD flamiche "type of Flemish cake or tart." It is
still served with salt.
(40) MS bar; Mon prints Bar; the Harley 2253 scribe's Dars "dace" suggests that Dar is the
correct reading for cod. 354 here.
(41) OFD vendoise, "bream (or similar freshwater fish)". The Harley scribe must have
distinguished vendoise from bream, however, since he lists both in his line 126. I have not been
able to decipher the Bern letansee carp or gudgeon?
(42) I assume foie is liver of some kind.

866
M'ont la borse voidee.
that have emptied my wallet.
Qant Pasques repaire,
When Easter arrives,
135] Joie ne me lait taire
for joy I can't keep quiet
Flaons, pastez voil faire
flawns and pasties I order up,
Por la costume a traire,
just to follow tradition.
Manju moston
I devour mutton
Au gras rongon:
of the fat-kidneyed kind,
140] L'angnel faz forz traire
1 skin a lamb right out
De son pelicon.
of its fleece.
L'antancion
I set my mind
m'est au poivre deffaire.
on peppering it just right.
Droit est que l'an ait
It's proper that one have
145] Gras bues en poree,
fat beef in stew,
Et tendre poucin,
and tender young chicken,
Oue en ranc garde.
goose kept in the stable
Au tans novel C4)
In the new season (spring),

CARTER REVARD
135] m'ont la bourse veydee.
that have emptied my wallet.
Quant la Pasche repoire,
When Easter arrives,
ie m'y last tayre
I just can't keep quiet
tart e flaon faz fere,
tarts and flawns I order up,
pur la saison retrere.
in the spirit of the season.
140] Molt aym motoun
I do love mutton,
a gras reynoun:
the fat-kidneyed kind,
e l'aignel faz fors trere
I skin a lamb right out
de pelicoun.
of its fleece,
m'entencioun
and set my mind
145] met au poyvre dfre.
on peppering it just right.
Droyz est qe l'en eyt motoun,
It's right to have mutton
en porree pucyns,
with leek potage and chicken,
en verynz (43),
[in a glass dish??]
oue en franke garde,
goose kept in the cow-shed.
150] Atant nouel
In the new season

(43) For Harley 2253 verynz which has no equivalent in Bern I can only find in OFD and
AND verrin etc., "glass". If line 147's en porree pucyns means "leek soup with chicken", I do not
see how the soup itself could be glass or like glass. In (Rey : 1993), the entry for verin says it
derives (attested 1389) from Latin veruina "long javelin," a diminutive of very "spit for roasting,"
adding that it is a word of Picard origin. The oue en ranc garde of Bern 147 and the oue en franke
garde of Harley 149 may be a goose kept, presumably for fattening, in a stable or cowshed. The
Glutton seems here to imagine mutton, stewed chicken, and a fat roast goose.
(44) In Au tans novel we seem to have OFD tens novel or saison novele "springtime": the poet
has turned from imagining the post-Lenten feasting of an Easter season to the gormandizing he
associates with the arrival of spring, and I assume the dish described in line 149, la teste en rost
apres I 'oel, is a roasted sheep's (or could it be a boar's?) head, served after the roast goose (J'oel,
Vowel, Bern 149, Harley 152). However, the Harley 2253 version, Atant nouel/ ius de tuel/ la
teste en rost apres I 'owel, is hard to decipher: perhaps the roasted head is brought in under a tuel =
mappe, serviette^ Or perhaps ius = "yoke" and tuel "pipe" ?

A GOLIARD'S FEAST AND THE METANARRATIVE OF HARLEY 2253


La teste en rost apres l'oel (45)
the head roasted after the goose
150] Et la paste salee.
and the pasty salted.
Joie ne me lait taire
Joy won't let me refrain
Por la costume a traire
from keeping up the custom,
Pie de porc en socie
pig's feet in broth
En froit solier
in a cold cellar
155] Que d'erbe fais jonchier,
which with herbs I strew
M enuement podree
lightly spiced

867

ius de tuel
under the napkin
la teste en rost apres Fowel,
the head roasted after the goose,
e gras cheueryl larde
and a fat kid in lard
ne me doit pas desployre
need not displease me
1 55] pur le manger retrere
for getting back to feasting
pee de porcke en socie
pigs' feet in broth
a froit celer,
from cold cellar
e haut soler,
and high sun-room
herbe mugier
with nutmeg-cloves
1 60] menuement poudre
lightly sprinkled
161] e ie m'envoys donks dormyr!
then I can get to sleep!

(45) AND uel, uiel, mvel; ...oel, oewel... "equal"; OFD ivel (adjective) "same, equal, alike," and
(adverb) "equally, evenly." Une oelle = brebis ("sheep"); oel, oelle = "goose." Perhaps in line 148
one en franke garde (Harley; 1. 146 in Bern oue en ranc garde), the reference is to a roasted goose
that had been kept enclosed and fattened in the table or cow-shed, and in lines 150-51 (Harley) or
150 (Bern), the dish being brought in is a roasted sheep's head: early on, when Easter season brings
the end of Lenten fare, a fat roast goose is served; then in the new season, a roasted head of sheep
or boar is brought in. A possible parallel here is the gluttonous Friar in Chaucer's Summoner's
Tale: asked by the rich man's wife what he would like to eat, he first specifies very dainty fare a
capon's liver, and a small slice of what our Slothful Glutton has referred to (line 11 7) as gastieu
rostiz, "toasted wastel-bread" and then calls for an entire roasted boar's head. Such sequence,
and its effect finicky gourmet turns wolfish gourmand may be what the poet intended us to
hear from our Slothful Glutton.

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