¹ The most convenient edition is that by Richard Buchholz, “Die Fragmente der Reden der Seele an den Leichnam,” Erlanger Beiträge, Bd. i (1890), Hft. vi, from which I cite the text. This edition gives a resumé of the earlier ones.

Important discussions appear in: J. Douglas Bruce, “A Contribution to the Study of ”The Body and Soul': Poems in English,“ MLN, v (1890), 393 ff.; and Louise Dudley, ”The Grave,“ MP, xi (1914), 429–442.

² R. W. Chambers, On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School (London: Humphrey Milford, 1932), p. lxix. One illustration of the fruitfulness of this point of view may be found in the articles by R. M. Wilson, “Lost Literature in Old and Middle English” and “More Lost Literature . . .,” Leeds Studies in English and Kindred Languages, ii (1933), 14–37; v (1936), 1–49.

³ Worcester Cathedral, MS.F 174, fol. 63a ff. These leaves belong to the second half of the twelfth century, but, as Chambers points out (Continuity, p. xci), the poem itself is probably a good deal earlier. The prologue reminds one of Saint Wulfstan's comment on Norman “improvements” (ca. 1090): “Our predecessors, it is true, knew not how to build as we do, but their lives were an example to their flock: we, neglecting the cure of souls, care only to heap up stones” (William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum, Rolls Series, p. 283; Chambers' translation, Continuity, p. xci); and of William of Malmesbury's own lament: “To-day, no Englishman is a duke, or a bishop, or an abbot: foreigners devour the wealth of England, and there is no hope of remedy” (Gesla Regum [written by 1127], Rolls Series, I, 278; Chambers' translation, Continuity, p. lxxxvi).

⁴ Chambers' translation, Continuity. p. xci; the text was printed by Hermann Varnhagen, “Zu Mittelenglischen Gedichten. IX, Ein fragment des 12. jahrh.,” Anglia, iii (1880), 423–425.

Buchholz did not print this passage as part of the Body and Soul poem, and Varnhagen makes no reference to the material which follows. It is clear, however, that the two belong together. Buchholz' “Fragment A” occurs on the verso of a leaf which contains at the top of its recto the end of Ælfric's Grammar (the subject of the other leaves found in this binding) and at the bottom this “Saint Bede” passage. But this passage ends incomplete with a reference to God's word:

þus beoþ godes word to worlde asende,

þet we sceolon fæier feþ. . . . .

and at the beginning of “Fragment A” the poet is already in the midst of a discussion of God's creation:

Ond alle þeo isceæftan, þe him to [s]cu[l]en;

Ond mid muchele cre[fte þo]ne mon he indihte,

Ond him on ileide lif ond soule.

The lines lost through trimming the leaf to make it fit the binding must once have acted as a transition between the two. In meter and style the two pieces are identical; for instance, 1.20 of the “Saint Bede” is a quotation from the Bible in Latin, and such Latin lines appear here and there throughout the Body and Soul poem (C21; E41; et al.). Even though the “Saint Bede” is short, it contains an example of the repetition of an important line which is so characteristic of the Body and Soul poem (cf. “Saint Bede” 3, 9, 15 and W.F.-A15–16, 25–28, et al.). Indeed, in the catalogue of the Worcester library the two pieces are described as a single unit; see J. K. Floyer and S. G. Hamilton, Catalogue of Manuscripts Preserved in the Chapter Library of Worcester Cathedral (Oxford, 1906).

⁵ E.g. the failure of the body to make a provision for the soul's welfare; a contrast between the former state of the body and soul and their present condition.

⁶ E.g. an Ubi Sunt? passage; a long comparison between the sins of the body and the quills on a porcupine.

⁷ Carleton Brown, English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1932), pp. 31, 46–54, 180, 188–191, 220–222. The general relationship between No. 29 and The W.F. seems to have first been noted by Bruce, loc. cit. Cf. especially the following lines:

⁸ For a particularly trenchant expression of this and the concomitant doctrine that Old English literature “cannot be an integral part of English literature,” see Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian, A History of English Literature (New York: Macmillan, 1931), pp. 76, 6, et. al.

⁹ R. W. Chambers, “The Lost Literature of Medieval England,” The Library, 4th Series, v (1925), 317. It is also very close to the meter of The Proverbs of Alfred and of Laзamon's Brut though the fact that these pieces are usually printed in half lines somewhat obscures the relationship.

¹⁰ Bruno Asseman, Angelsächsische Homilien und Heiligenleben, Bibliothek der Angelsächsischen Prosa, iii (Kassel, 1889), 1 ff., 13 ff., 49 ff.

¹¹ Cf. “Preface to the Catholic Homilies” in Benjamin Thorpe, The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church, Part i (London, 1844), 2.

¹² Apparently Ælfric knew, without instruction from Taillefer, how to “shed . . . periphrases and ejaculations and gradually to learn sobriety of style,” but cf. Legouis and Cazamian, op. cit., p. 55.

¹³ Cf. also W.F.-G 27 with Ælfric, 58: 171, and W.F.-F 35 and -G 55 with Ælfric, 55: 130.

¹⁴ E.g. W.F.-F 20 ff. and Ælfric, 63: 277 ff.

¹⁵ Italics mine. Cf. also W.F.-F 34 ff. with Ælfric, 11: 289 ff.

¹⁶ E.g., W.F.-A 8, 16, 30; Ælfric, 18: 106 ff. or 54: 98, 108.

¹⁷ The two copies are printed parallel in Christian Grein and Richard Wülker, Bibliothek der Angelsächsischen Poesie (Leipzig: Wigand's, 1894), iii, 92–107. My citations are from the Vercelli copy printed as Body and Soul I by George Philip Krapp, The Verclli Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, ii (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1932), 54–59.

¹⁸ I. Address made at time of death, printed

(a) from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 201 by Benjamin Thorpe, Ancient Laws and Institutes of England, folio ed., (London, 1849), p. 466 ff.,

(b) from Bodleian Library, MS. Hatton 113 (Junius 99) by A. S. Napier, Wulfstan . . ., Sammlung Englischer Denkmäler in Kritischen Ausgabe, iv (1883), 140 f. These text were reprinted parallel with the Latin copies by Louise Dudley, “An Early Homily on the ‘Body and Soul’ Theme,” JEGP, viii (1909), 225 ff.

II. Address made at soul's return to body in the grave, printed from MS. Junius 85, fol. 2v ff., by Rudolph Willard, “The Address of the Soul to the Body,” PMLA, l (1935), 961–963.

III. Another Address made at soul's return to body in the grave, printed from Cambridge University, MS Ii.1.33, p. 412, by Willard, PMLA, l, 963–965.

IV. Short Address made at Doomsday, printed from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS. 302 and from British Museum, MS. Cotton Faustina A 9 by Asseman, op. cit., p. 167.

V. Long Address made at Doomsday, printed from The Vercelli Book (Homily IV) by Max Förster, Die Vercelli Homilien, Bibliothek der Angelsächsischen Prosa, xii (Hamburg, 1932), 82–103.

Another complete copy of this homily exists on the margin of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS. 41 and will soon be printed by Willard. A fragment of the speech of the evil soul in this homily is preserved on an odd leaf now bound up with Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS. 367 and was printed by M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Cambridge University Press, 1912), ii, 204.

For a thorough study of the Body and Soul legend proper as it appears in all of these homilies and in the Exeter-Vercelli poem, see Willard, PMLA, l, 957–983.

¹⁹ Both use the motif of the Address of the Soul as a framework for other memento-mori themes; both contain an elaborate description of the destruction of the body by the worms (W.F.—C38-D6; Body and Soul I, 108–125). Their settings, however, are quite different: in the OE poem the Address is made when the soul returns to the grave where the body has long been buried; in The W.F. it occurs immediately after death. The most sensible theory about the relationship between them seems to be that the two writers had a common background of sermon literature but worked independently.

Except for The Latemest Day, these two English poems seem to be the only examples of the expanded Address in verse which have come to light, although the Debate of the Body and Soul appears in Latin and in almost all of the vernacular languages of medieval Europe. There are short metrical Addresses in the Walloon Li Ver del Juise (twelfth century) and in the Old French Vie de St. Alexis (thirteenth century; rimed), but these are little more than direct versifications of the brief speech in the Body and Soul exemplum. From th e documents which we now have it would seem that the Address as a framework for a moral poem appealed only to English poets, while the appeal of the Debate was universal. The appearance of new material may, of course, change this situation.

²⁰ This detail appears in CCCC, MS. 201 only; see p. 303 below.

²¹ On the Eastern origin of the Body and Soul legend and the importance of this exemplum in its Western development, see: Th. Batiouchkof, “Le Débat de l'Ame e du Corps,” Romania, xx (1891), 1 ff.; and Louise Dudley, JEGP, viii, and The Egyptian Elements in the Legend of the Body and Soul, Bryn Mawr College Monographs, No. 8 (Baltimore: Furst, 1911). For our purpose, however, it is the fact that this form of the legend existed in Old English which counts.

²² Dudley, Egyptian Elements, pp. 18–31.

²³ See Willard, PMLA, l, 965–983.

²⁴ In other words he has substituted for some of the more weird Eastern elements of the legend homely scenes from contemporary life.

²⁵ This shift is made also in the Debates, apparently for the same reason; see Dudley, Egyptian Elements, p. 115.

²⁶ See Willard, PMLA, l, passim, for an analysis of this point.

²⁷ Throughout its history the speech elements in the Body and Soul legend always tended to grow at the expense of the setting; see Dudley, Egyptian Elements, p. 149.

²⁸ W.F.-E 17 ff.; MS.Ii.l.33,l. 41.

²⁹ W.F.-E 9 ff. el al.; Ms.Ii.l.33, 1.48.

³⁰ W.F.-A38 ff. and -B38 f.; Vercelli No. 4, 1. 299.

³¹ W.F.-D43; Vercelli No. 4, 1. 256. The presence of this idea in the soul's speech shows how the Body and Soul legend was transformed by medieval writers. In the early Eastern versions the soul is unwilling to die and must be dragged out (evil soul) or persuaded to come forth (good soul) by the spirits which come to take it; see Dudley, Egyptian Elements pp. 18–28.

³² W.F.-B4 ff.; Vercelli No. 4, 1. 296. This is the only early homily which I have found in any language that makes this theme an actual part of the soul's speech. It is a common feature in the debates.

CCCC MS. 201 and Cambridge MS.Ii.l. 33 have an Ubi Sunt? passage just before the Body and Soul material begins. It is based on a passage in No. 68 of the Sermones ad Fratres in Eremo (printed in J. P. Migne, P. L., xl, col. 1354). There is another in Blickling Homily Villa (edited by Richard Morris, The Blickling Homilies . . ., E. E. T. S. os. lvii (1874), 97) based on part of No. 58 of the Sermones ad Fratres (Migne, P.L., xl, 1341) For the motif elsewhere in OE literature, see F. Kluge, “Zu Altenglischen Dichtungen, 2. Nochmals der Seefahrer,” Engiische Studien, viii (1885), 472 ff.

³³ W.F.-G15, 22; Vercelli No. 4, 1. 288.

³⁴ W.F.-E44 ff.; Vercelli No. 4, 1. 334.

³⁵ Most of them go back at least as far as the homilies and Necrosima of Ephraem Syrus who died shortly before 375 a.d. Many of them seem to have been spread in the West by Latin homilies like Batiouchkof's “Homily of Rome” (from Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. 2096, printed Romania, xx, 576 ff.) and the pseudo-Augustinian collection, Sermones ad Fratres in Eremo. But the peculiar concrete touches and the phrases constantly associated with these themes in the OE homilies, in The W.F., and in so much later poetry are much less common or so far unknown in early Latin material.

Nor do we know at present of any early Latin document which collects a large mass of this material within the frame offered by the speech of the soul, as is done in Vercelli Homily IV. Such a text may, of course, still be found, but there now seems to be no Latin document intermediate between the brief speech of the soul in the primitive exemplum and the elaborate twelfth-century debate in British Museum, MS. Royal 7 A III. To assume that the twelfth-century English poet worked to any large extent from the Latin rather than the Old English versions seems about equivalent to assuming that Shakespeare, in writing Macbeth, worked from a knowledge of Marianus Scotus rather than of Holinshed.

³⁶ Italics mine.

³⁷ The speeches of the soul in the short Doomsday homily and in Junius 85 are very similar; see Willard, PMLA, l, 959.

³⁸ Italics mine.

³⁹ See note 18 above.

⁴⁰ Italics mine.

⁴¹ Italics mine.

⁴² Chambers (Continuity, pp. xc-xciv) has made it clear that OE homilies were still influential as late as the beginning of the thirteenth century. Since even the extant copy of The W.F. is earlier than this and the composition of the poem may have been much earlier (see note 3 above), there is no need to discuss whether or not OE sermon material would in general have been current when the poet wrote.

The dates of the MSS which preserve Body and Soul material in Old English are, however, interesting here. Of these The Vercelli Book (late tenth century) is perhaps the earliest, and this particular MS may have gone to Italy even before the Conquest. On the other hand, a second copy of the expanded prose Address which it contains appears on the margin of MS. Corpus Christi 41. This book (eleventh century) was one of Bishop Leofric's gifts to Exeter (1072), and the marginal material is later than the text itself (James, CCCC MSS., i, 81 ft). Indeed, Max Forster (“Die Vercelli-Codex CXVII nebst Abdruck einiger altenglischer Homilien der Handschrift,” Festschrift für Lorenz Morsbach, Halle, 1913, p. 72 note) dates this copy of the Body and Soul homily “um 1080”. The literal translation of the primitive Body and Soul exemplum appears in MS. Corpus Christi 201 of which James (CCCC MSS, i, 485) says “circa tempus conquistionis Angliæ, ut uidetur, exaratus.” According to Willard (PMLA, l, 958) MS. Junius 85 was also written about the middle of the eleventh century, while both the MSS which contain the short Address at Doomsday apparently belong to the latter part of the eleventh century (for MS. Corpus Christi 302 see James, CCCC MSS., ii, 92; for MS. Cotton Faustina A 9 see Wanley, p. 199). Finally Willard (PMLA, l, 978) describes Cambridge University MS. Ii.l.33 as “full twelfth century.” Thus even as the poet was working on his verses, his contemporaries in the scriptoria may have been making some of the copies of the older sermons which have come down to us.

There are some twelfth century English memento-mori sermons in the collections printed by Richard Morris as:Old English Homilies and Homiletic Treatises (EETS. os 29 & 34) pp. 18–19, 34–35, 40–41; and Old English Homilies of the Twelfth Century (EETS. os 53) p. 183 from MS. Trinity College B.14.52. The latter contains a very brief Address by both the good and the evil soul. None of these sermons is as close to The W.F. as the pre-Conquest homilies discussed above, but they serve to show how little change the Conquest made in English preaching of this type.

⁴³ I am sorry that limitations of an article such as this make it necessary to dismiss this subject with only a superficial treatment of a few almost random examples. Nothing, it seems to me, shows more clearly the service done for Middle English religious poetry by the early preachers in the vernacular than a line by line comparison of these OE memento-mori sermons with their Latin sources. On almost every page the English version adds some concrete detail or works out some phrase later to become the stuff of poetry.

For some additional examples, compare the first part of the Body and Soul homily in Cambridge University MS. Ii.l.33 (to be printed by Willard) with No. 68 of the Sermones ad Fratres (Migne, P.L., xl, 1354–55); and the Ubi Sunt? passage printed by Kluge (loc. cit., p. 472 ff.) from MS. Cotton Tiberius A III with its source in Bede's Liber Scintillarum.

⁴⁴ See page 297 above.

⁴⁵ Whether the OE translator invented this detail or whether he simply retained a feature of the original Latin text often excised by redactors makes little difference for our purpose, since by doing either he helped make material used by the twelfth-century poet especially current in English.

Miss Dudley (Egyptian Elements, pp. 112–113) could not decide which of these views was preferable.

⁴⁵ Förster, Festschrift, p. 78; text of the homily p. 137 ff.

⁴⁶ Migne, P.L., lxxxiii, col. 825 ff. The preface describes the subject of the Synonyma thus: . . . introducit personam hominis, lamentantis in ærumnis præsentis sæculi, seque deflentis pene usque ad desperationis defluxum, cut mirabili concursu ratio obvians, leni hunc moderamine consolatur. . . .

The OE translation begins with Section V of this edition. It intersperses an almost literal rendering with phrases like þonne зyt зeomrađ seo sawl, þe hire lif ær on receleaste lifde & cwiđ which have no equivalent in the Latin, but which do approach The W.F.

⁴⁸ See Rudolph Willard, Two Apocrypha in Old English Homilies, Beiträge zur Englischen Philologie, xxx (Leipzig, 1935), “The Three Utterances.”

⁴⁹ Morris, Blickling Homilies, p. 99.

⁵⁰ Migne, P.L., xl, col. 1341, “Sermo lviii.”

⁵¹ W.F.-C 5, C 28, D 24, E 4, et al. It was also a favorite with later English poets. See the many variants of the Erpe upon Erpe poem collected by Hilda Murray (Earth upon Earth, EETS. os. 141 (1911)) and her statement (ibid., p. xxx): “The play on the word earth, which is the most essential feature of the poem, could not have been given with the same force as in English either in Latin or any medieval language.” There is also Shakespeare's:

The earth can have but earth, which is his due.

(Sonnet 74:7)

⁵² I do not mean, of course, to imply by these samples that Latin parallels for many of the alterations noted may not be found (see note 35 above), but simply to show that OE preachers had, well before the Conquest, set a definite style for handling this material in English, a style which the author of The Worcester Fragments followed exactly.

⁵³ Several Latin and French writers of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries tell of using English books as sources. To the example of Gaimar cited by Chambers (Continuity, p. lxxxviii) may be added Osbeorn of Canterbury, William of Malmesbury, and Eadmer. Each of these writers in the preface to his Life of Saint Dunstan notes specifically that he used English, and especially pre-Conquest English, material on his subject (William Stubbs, Memorials of St. Dunstan, Rolls Series, lxiii (London, 1874), 70, 163, 252, 253, 412). Osbeorn was apparently a Norman monk first established at Canterbury by Edward the Confessor and later an enthusiastic follower of Lanfranc; William of Malmesbury, a man of the next generation, was half Norman by birth and acquainted with Henry I; Eadmer, though probably of English blood, was educated under Lanfranc and a great admirer of Anselm. All three, unlike their contemporary, Florence of Worcester, had a more or less Norman point of view in politics, and Osbeorn and Eadmer accepted wholeheartedly the ecclesiastical reforms of Lanfranc. Surely, if such men used English sources, it would not be strange if a contemporary poet writing in English for English folk used them also.

⁵⁴ W.F.-A34:, Grave 6; W.F.-B39, Grave 5; W.F.-B40, Grave 13; W.F.-C29 ff., Grave 7 ff.; W.F.-D24, Grave 16; W.F.-F16, Grave 14; W.F.-F17 f., Grave 17 ff.

Early editors considered this poem a borrowing from, or a further fragment of, The W.F. But Miss Dudley (M. P., xi, passim) proved conclusively that The Grave is the source of the corresponding lines in The W.F.

⁵⁵ The Grave is preserved on a blank half page (fol. 170) in Bodleian Library, MS. 343, a collection of hymns and sermons (Dudley, MP, xi, 429). Buchholz (loc. cit.) printed it as “The Oxford Fragment”; I cite the text from this edition.

The poem itself is sometimes treated as a specimen of OE poetry (cf. Legouis and Cazamian, op. cit., p. 49), and, unlike The W.F., contains nothing which precludes a pre-Conquest date.

⁵⁶ W.F.-C31: þin rof liip on þine breoste ful [neih].

Grave 10: þe rof bid ibyld þire breoste ful neh.

Text of the homily from Förster, Festschrift, p. 108. Ultimately this motif probably goes back to the Non descendunt ad inferos magnifidae aedes of Ephraem Syrus (Opera, edited by Asseman, Benedict, and Asseman, Gr. Lat., iii, 260), but the form and phrasing which it assumes in The Grave and The W.F. are those found in the OE homily. Variants of this line, which substitute chin or nose for chest, are common in later pieces, both English and Latin. For some examples see Brown, op. cit., pp. 47, 130, 222.

⁵⁷ W.F.-A34: Mon hine met mid one зerđe ond þa mol[de] seoþþen.

Grave 6: Nu me sceœl þe meten and þa molde seođđa.

⁵⁸ Cf. III Henry VI, v: 2:

My parks, my walks, my manors that I had,

Even now forsake me, and of all my lands

Is nothing left me but my body's length.

⁵⁹ See R. W. Chambers, England before the Norman Conquest (London: Longmans, Green, 1928), p. 310.

⁶⁰ A. J. Wyatt, Old English Riddles, Belle-Lettres Series (Boston, 1912), p. 31.

⁶¹ Ibid., p. 98.

⁶² Krapp, Vercelli Book, p. 59.

⁶³ For examples see page 8 above. Some others appear from a comparison of “Fragment F” 34–50 with The Old English Hexameron (especially 11. 31, 96, 330, 341). This text is ascribed by its editor to Æliric; see S. J. Crawford, Exameron Anglice or The Old English Hexameron, Bibliothek der Angelsächsischen Prosa, x (Hamburg, 1921), 18 ff.

⁶⁴ This would account for the fact that, although the setting in the poem corresponds to but one of the OE Body and Soul sermons, the speech of the soul corresponds to several. The settings in the homilies are too dissimilar to be worked together, but the speeches are enough alike to call each other to mind almost automatically.

⁶⁵ The amount of this timeworn memento-mori material used by Shakespeare is surprising until one remembers Walter Raleigh's ever pertinent remark about Shakespeare and “the floating debris of popular literature.” It ranges in character all the way from Falstaff's “Peace, good Doll! do not speak like a death's-head. Do not bid me remember mine end” (II Henry IV, ii: 4) to such lines as:

No longer mourn for me when I am dead

Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell

Give warning to the world that I am fled

From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell.

(Sonnet 71:1–4)

(For some other examples see notes 51 and 58 above.) The largest blocks of it are the graveyard scene, the “Body and Soul” sonnet, and Clarence's dream (Richard III, i: 4). The latter, in spite of some classical elements, is particularly close to its medieval counterparts—the dream journeys to the otherworld like The Vision of Drihthelm or St. Patrick's Purgatory.