¹ Mod. Phil., xvii, 247 f.

² PMLA, xiiv (1929), 329 f.

³ The Owl and the Nightingale (1922), p. xxxv.

⁴ The Owl and the Nightingale, Sources, Date, Author, University of Pennsylvania Dissertation (1931), pp. 76 f.

⁵ PMLA, xliv (1929), 329.

⁶ The distinction between prayers for the living and those for the dead is well illustrated in the directions concerning the religious exercises of the community at Ewelme established by Thomas Chaucer's son-in-law and daughter, the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk in 1437 (Martin B. Ruud, Thomas Chaucer, 1926, p. 123): “The mayster, if he be present, or the teacher of grammer or the minister or one of the brothers shall openli and distinctly say in Englissh tong duryng the lyves of our seide soverayne lord and of us both, ‘God save in body and soule our Soverayne Lord the Kyng, my lord William Duke of Suffolk, my lady Alyce Duchess of Suffolk his wife our founders,’ etc. And after the dessesse of our soverayne lord and of us both … one of them shall say in Englissh tong, ‘God have mercy of the soule of the noble prince Kyng Harry the Sext and of the soules of my lord William, sum tyme Duke of Suffolk and my lady Alice Duchess of Suffolke his wife our fyrst founders and of theyrfadyr and modyr soules and all cristen soules …”

⁷ Surtees Society, 63 (1874), p. 224.

⁸ N.E.D., citation from Giraldus Cambrensis, Rolls Series, 21, viii, 180.

⁹ Remaines, ed. 1637, pp. 383–384.

¹⁰ Surtees Society (1876), ii, 168.

¹¹ Surtees Society (1888), ii, 108.

¹² Surtees Society, 63 (1874).

¹³ York Manual, pp. 127 (York), 222 (Sarum), 225 (London) Lay Folk's Mass Book, E.E.T.S., 71, p. 72.

¹⁴ In the Fifty Earliest English Wills (1387–1439), printed by Furnivall, E.E.T.S., 1882, the testator follows usually the convention of bequeathing his or her soul “to God Almighty and to the Virgin and to all the fair company of heaven” or, as in the will of John Olney of Weston (p. 47), “to the mercy of the mightful Jesus”; and then, as in the will of Lady Alice West (pp. 6–7), of devoting large sums of money to masses and prayers “for my lord's soul and mine and for all Christian souls” (the dead) and “for the estate of my son aforesaid and Joan his wife and her children (the living). ” Hence the vehement protests of sixteenth-century reformers like Philip Stubbes, cited in Furnivall's “Foreword” to the Wills, pp. xii–xiii, against “the giving by men and women of the greatest part of their goods and lands to priests, monks and friars, to the end that they may pray for them when they are dead, to say masses, trentals, diriges, de profundis, ladies psalters … that their souls and the souls of all their friends, parents, kindred and alliance shall not only be relieved but clearly delivered out of the pains of purgatory, etc.” Requiem masses for the repose of souls are still constantly sung in the Church of Rome.

¹⁵ Fabric Rolls of York Minster, Surtees Society, 35 (1858), p. 301.

¹⁶ Stubbs, Memorials of Richard, Rolls Series, 38, i, 450.

¹⁷ And as the soul of Henry II is in question, one recalls Jocelin of Brakeland's record, in his Chronicle, Arnold, Memorials of St. Edmund's Abbey, Rolls Series, 96, i, 250, after the king's death in 1189 that “Queen Eleanor took from us a great gold chalice of the value of a thousand marks, and restored this same chalice to us for the good of the soul of King Henry her lord, who had originally given it to St. Edmund.” Royal generosity indeed!

¹⁸ In “cantabunt angelorum chori” the author is pillaging the phrase of the formal service for the passing of souls (York Manual, p. 56).

¹⁹ Although Hinckley admits, Mod. Phil., xviii, 258, that the context shows that Map was dead in 1210, when Giraldus wrote this, he refuses to read such an implication in the formula itself.

²⁰ So Stephen Hawes of Lydgate himself at the close of the Passetime of Pleasure: “Of my mayster Lydgate to follow the trace / On whose soul I pray God have mercy.”

²¹ Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, E.E.T.S. (1928), p. 98.

²² Joinville's Histoire de Saint Louis repeatedly links with the names of great ones who have gone the phrase “que Dieu absolve,” which Marzials (Everyman Edition) rightly renders, “whom God have in his mercy” or “to whom may God show mercy.” For English use of the phrase of absolution, “whom God assoile,” see Wright, Political Poems, ii, 131.

²³ “Prohemye to Tullius of Olde Age” (1481), Prologues and Epilogues, p. 44.

²⁴ It is significant that, unlike our resurrectionists, Walter Scott runs true to medieval form in Ivanhoe, chap. iv: “And respecting language, I willingly hold communication in that spoken by my grandmother, Hilda of Middleham, who died in odor of sanctity little short, if we may presume to say so, of her glorious namesake, the blessed Saint Hilda of Whitby, God be gracious to her soull” Variants of the mortuary formula are still common in the everyday speech of Catholic Ireland.

²⁵ Miss Huganir, p. 99, notes these parallels, but, believing in the priority of our poet, she regards him as a debtor not to the Anglo-Latinists but to the general knowledge possessed by men of his time. Giraldus, Topography of Ireland, i, xviii, marks the non-appearance of nightingales in Ireland, and Neckham, De Naturis Rerum, i, 5–1, their avoidance of cold countries.

²⁶ PMLA, xliv (1929), 344.

²⁷ PMLA, xlvii (1932), 308.

²⁸ Courthope, History of English Poetry, i, 135, notes that “the nightingale's argument as to the use of sweet singing is taken from Alexander of Neckam.”

²⁹ Courthope, loc. cit., citing this parallel, comments, “He [the Owl poet] had undoubtedly read Alexander of Neckam's chapter on the Nightingale” and adds that the detail of the snares is from Marie de France's “Lai du Laustic,” 95.

³⁰ See Huganir, p. 20.

³¹ As direct indebtedness of the Owl poet to Neckam is fatal to Miss Huganir's theory of an early date of the English poem, she makes the poet a “helluo librorum,” a delver in all Neckam's mines of information, discovering that scholar's good things before him.

³² It is interesting that one scholar, Courthope, History of English Poetry, i, 136, thought that Henry III was the king of the death-prayer. As Miss Huganir's list (pp. 63–64) shows, conjectures of date range over a century. The older of the two MSS., Cotton Caligula IX, is “accepted as of the first half of the thirteenth century.” The Anglo-Norman Chronicle, which is among its contents, ends with the accession of the Third Henry.

³³ M. E. lome (lame) has a larger scope than our modern lame, “crippled in leg or foot.” In lines 363–364 of the poem the Owl resents the charge that ‘she is lame in her eyes’ (“ich am on mine eзen lome”). “Debilis vel enervatus” is the lemma to lome in the Glossaries (Wright-Wülcker, 162, 1). “Weak” or “infirm” would seem to be the present-day equivalent.

³⁴ England under the Angevin Kings, ii, 294.

³⁵ Unlike Richard, Leopold, his captor, became lame indeed—suffering an injury to his foot which necessitated amputation, “a judgement of God,” says Ralph de Diceto in 1194 (Rolls Series, 68, 116), “because he had restrained the feet of Richard.”

³⁶ Roger of Hoveden, Chronicle, Rolls Series, 51, iii, 205, discussed by Norgate, Angevin Kings, ii, 323.

³⁷ Gervase of Canterbury, Rolls Series, 73, i, 524, 426.

³⁸ Selections from Early Middle English (1920), ii, 566–567.

³⁹ This royal order issued by Archbishop Hubert as Chief Justice is reproduced in full by Roger Hoveden, iii, 299–300 (see Stubb's Select Charters, p. 264).

⁴⁰ See Owl and the Nightingale, ii, 1215, 1683.

⁴¹ England under the Angevin Kings, ii, 340.

⁴² Miss Huganir again ignores the remarkable Peace Edict of 1195 and its results in her surprising statement (p. 95) that “the reign of Richard I does not seem noteworthy either for the respect shown the law or the vigorous enactment thereof. I do not think that the ‘Peace’ mentioned in verses 1730–34 is referable to the reign of Richard I.” This statement and assumption directly conflict with Hoveden's statement (loc. cit.) that, in consequence of the Edict, “many were arrested and put in the king's prisons, and that many others being forewarned thereof and having bad consciences left their homes and possessions, and took to flight.” To those guilty of breach of peace ‘harm and shame’ came in full measure (see Maitland's Three Rolls of King's Court in the Reign of Richard I (London, 1891).)

⁴³ De Gestis Regum, Rolls Series, 90, ii, 399.

⁴⁴ Since the context (ll. 1010–25), an unbroken series of personal pronouns referring to the Norwegians, shows clearly that the “good man from Rome” (l. 1015, “sum from Rome”) is a legate not to all the Northern countries, as Hinckley and Atkins believe, but to Norway alone, I readily accept Miss Huganir's identification of him as that very memorable person, Nicholas Breakspear—afterwards Adrian IV, the only English pope,—who in 1152–54 (“some time ago”) organized the Norwegian Church. May we not henceforth bar from the picture so irrelevant a prelate as the rapacious Cardinal Vivian, who in 1176 visited on a papal commission, Ireland, Scotland, Galloway, but not Norway, the only land which our poet associates with the coming of “the good man”? If any one quarrels with the inclusion of Galloway in our author's group on the ground that it had lost its political independence before the beginning of Richard's reign, let him remember that the Owl is merely citing four unmusical regions in which the nightingale never sings but which have large need of her song. Galloway, despite its subjection, did not lose its name and topographical identity, and its princes are much in men's mouths towards the close of the century (Hoveden iv. 145).

⁴⁵ Mod. Phil., xvii (1919), 66.

⁴⁶ Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings, ii, 281, citing Gesta Ricardi (Stubbs), p. 18; Roger Hoveden, iii, 25–26.

⁴⁷ Roger Hoveden, iii, 244.—Both the release of 1189 and the safe-conduct of 1194, under the hand of William of Ely, the Chancellor, and with the signatures of many bishops, are printed in Rymer, Foedera, i, 50, 62.

⁴⁸ See Hoveden, iii, 298–299, 308, iv, 33.

⁴⁹ Hoveden, iv, 33: “Eodem anno (1197) Willelmus, rex Scottorum, de bono sumens exemplum, fecit homines regni sui jurare quod pacem pro posse suo servabunt, etc.”

⁵⁰ Stubbs' Introduction to Hoveden, iv, p. xxxviii.

⁵¹ William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, v, xi, Rolls Series (1885), p. 440. See also D.N.B. s.v.

⁵² Roger Hoveden, iii, 142.

⁵³ Gervase of Canterbury, ii, 406; Giraldus Cambrensis, iii, 23 f. (D.N.B.)

⁵⁴ Hoveden, iii, 268.

⁵⁵ Das Mittelenglische Streitgedicht Eule und Nachtigal, Palaestra (1909), p. 12.

⁵⁶ Great Roll of the Pipe, 27 Henry II, xxx, 8, 30; 28 Henry II, xxxi (cited by Huganir).

⁵⁷ Maitland, Introduction to Three Rolls of the King's Court in Reign of King Richard (1891), p. xxv, draws from the Pipe Roll, 7 Richard I (See Stenton's text of this, London 1929, xix–xxii) the list of justices by whom the eyre was conducted. Among these are Master Thomas of Hurstbourne (whose name and title frequently reappear in court records), Master Aristotle, Master John of Bridport, Master Roger Arundel. In Dorset and Somerset at the time of our poem—the middle eleven nineties (7 Richard I)—are two sets of pleas, one heard by the Abbot of Hyde, Richard Barre, Archdeacon of Ely, and William de Warenne; the other by Master Thomas of Hurstbourne and Oger Fitz Oger.

⁵⁸ One has a sense of snatching Master Nicholas from very bad company, when he reads Walter Map's account of the itinerant justices in 1181 (De Nugis Curialium i, x) as “owls, night-hawks, vultures, bubos, whose eyes the darkness love and hate the light.”—He adds that “among the justices mentioned are oft found clerks harsher than the laity. A certain abbot took upon himself to become one of these justices, and he, more cruelly than any laymen, spurred on the spoiling of the poor, hoping perchance to win a bishopric through the favor gained from his spoils.” Walter knew, for he was himself an itinerant justice, and “master,” too.

⁵⁹ Selections from Early Middle English, ii, 567.

⁶⁰ This suggestion, made in all diffidence, is, I think, quite as much to the purpose as Atkins' query (p. 149) “whether Master Nicholas may not have been responsible for that version of Glanvil's popular Tractatus de Legibus (1187), which became current in Scotland under the title of Regiam Majestatem.” We are in the airy regions of surmise.

⁶¹ Wells, The Owl and the Nightingale, p. xxvi.

⁶² See Gesta Henrici, Stubbs, i, 348–349, cited by Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings, ii, 237. For conditions in Galloway with which everybody of the time must have been perfectly familiar, see the pages of the Gesta and of Roger Hoveden, ii, passim.

⁶³ Note the difference between our sketch and that of Giraldus' (Topography of Ireland, iii, x).

⁶⁴ Historia Danica, lib. xiv, Muller's edition, 1839, i, 697–698.

⁶⁵ Chronica Majora, ii, 204, Rolls Series, 57.

⁶⁶ John of Salisbury, Policraticus, viii, xxxiii, Webb, ii, 410–411.