An unpublished fifteenth-century Carol Collection: Oxford, Lincoln College MS Lat. 141.(Essay)

Medium Aevum Essay Prize 2008

The fifteenth century is the first period from which substantial numbers of vernacular English songs survive, in both notated and un-notated manuscripts, together testifying to a vigorous written tradition. Many of these texts are in carol form: regular stanzas with a refrain section written at the head of the song. (1) Such carols were often written singly on flyleaves or in margins, but hundreds were gathered together in anthologies. (2) The short collection of English songs that fills the first quire of Oxford, Lincoln College MS Lat. 141 (hereafter, Lincoln Lat. 141) belongs within this corpus.

The manuscript is a composite book put together around 1600 and the first quire contains a collection of song texts written in a late fifteenth-century hand. The quire is imperfect at the beginning, and now holds nine full texts and further fragments. The final two texts were edited by Edward Wilson in 1980 but the others remain unpublished. (3) The New Index of Middle English Verse lists only the two carols edited by Wilson and one other, a version of a carol extant elsewhere. (4) This article seeks to present and explore this previously overlooked material. It will begin with a description of the fifteenth-century part of the manuscript, then provide edited texts of the unpublished verses, and lastly will analyse the group and examine their relation to other carol collections.

As in numerous better-known manuscripts containing carols, the texts in Lincoln Lat. 141 appear to be gathered together according to coherent principles. The agreement between manuscript organization and the generic terminology used today appears promising for the purposes of the now well-established critical approach of exploring Middle English lyrics within their manuscript contexts, exemplified in work by Julia Boffey and Susanna Fein among others. (5) The Lincoln carols illustrate the circulation of un-notated song in short sequences, possibly making up cheap, easily distributed booklets. This method of writing and distribution is especially significant to the development of vernacular short verse before print, and can be traced through the networks formed by textual connections in extant manuscripts. Dialect studies have tentatively associated Lincoln Lat. 141 with Norfolk, and several other fifteenth-century carol manuscripts are also associated with the region. These texts can potentially contribute towards a 'literary geography', an idea explored by Richard Beadle with particular reference to late medieval Norfolk. (6) Surviving manuscripts provide this collection with a rich context of vernacular song production, developed, written, and shared within a range of formats.

The texts, six of which are macaronic, also illustrate the role of the liturgy in development of English verse. As an important source of shared song and narrative, directly linked with communal celebrations through the year, liturgy was intimately connected with vernacular festive songs, of which carols are the most successful type in this period. In emphasizing the centrality of liturgy to medieval cultural production, Bruce Holsinger has recently raised a series of challenging questions for literary studies in the period: 'What modes of convergence and mutuality affiliate the liturgical and the literary? ... More radically, perhaps, in what sense might literature be seen as in part an effect of liturgy, a curious by-product of the immense cultural industry invested in the Word of God by the institutions that performed it?' (7) As festive songs that could also be read, carols such as those contained in Lincoln Lat. 141 occupy an uncertain territory between the liturgical and the literary, making them especially pertinent to this area of research. The final section of this article will examine the ways in which the liturgical content of the texts is developed by the vernacular verse and how this interaction contributes to the texts' construction as group song. Rather than treating the Latin contained in these texts as an indicator that they are an elite form, liturgical quotations can instead connect the manuscript's texts to a tradition of performance, communal celebration, and remembered images and words, feeding into a fertile, and possibly localizable, expressive form.

The manuscript

Lincoln Lar. 141 was bound together towards the end of the sixteenth century or at the start of the seventeenth, probably for John Smith, born in 1563 and a graduate of Cambridge University. (8) Smith's books now belong to Lincoln College, Oxford, and his handwriting appears in annotations throughout Lincoln Lat. 141. The manuscript is largely made up of lexicographical material, including two sixteenth-century Latin-English vocabularies and one sixteenth-century Greek-English vocabulary. The first part of this composite manuscript is made of twenty-two folios written in a late fifteenth-century hand, and this section is fully described by N. R. Ker in Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries. (9) The pages are paper measuring 153 x 103 mm, plainly written without colour, and a single scribe, writing a small current anglicana, is responsible for the main texts. Remounting has disrupted the foliation, and the numerical sequence includes strips used to strengthen the book. The contents are as follows (following Ker's description): (10)