A Lydgate Phantom No More: An Unnoticed Copy of a Middle English Poem in the Chancery Miscellanea

The study of medieval literature relies heavily on the diligent work of bibliographers and indexers, but even the most meticulous catalogues can harbour undiscovered gems or perpetuate unintentional errors. Such is the case with a small, unassuming fragment of verse found within the bundle of various materials associated with the Westminster writing offices, Chancery Miscellanea C 47/34/1 (London, the National Archives). This bundle contains several fragments of verse, all of which except for one have been identified and captured by the Index of Middle English Verse (IMEV) and its two successor indexes, The New Index of Middle English Verse (NIMEV) and The Digital Index of Middle English Verse (DIMEV).1 Item 4 in C 47/34/1 is an oblong strip of paper containing one fragmentary and one complete Middle English lyric, ordered horizontally and written against the direction of the chain lines, suggesting that the paper was repurposed. The item on the right is known as a single rhyme-royal stanza, ‘Wo worth debate that never hathe pees’ (NIMEV 4215; DIMEV 6775), of which C 47/34/1/4 is one of five known witnesses. Both NIMEV and DIMEV give the repository ‘PRO’, ‘the Public Record Office, the former name of the British national archives (TNA), in use between 1838 until 2003. The record on the left is mentioned neither in IMEV, nor in its two successors. This is perplexing since the title of the item on the left, ‘Balade coloured And reuersed’ is actually written on the right side of the strip, set in a larger module inside a textbox above the stanza from ‘Wo worth debate that never hathe pees’. The IMEV editors overlooked the stanza on the left, and the two successor indexes inherited this oversight. The stanza on the left is the first stanza from the lyric IMEV/NIMEV 1237 (also listed as #605 in Bibliography and Index of English Verse in Manuscript, 1501–1558 [TM]),2 ‘Balade coulourd and reuersid’, a poem consisting of three Monk’s-Tale stanzas and a four-line envoy. ‘Reuersid’ refers to the design of the poem: each line can be read backwards without altering the complex rhyme scheme, prompting Derek Pearsall to call it a ‘rare example of English aspiring to the imbecile ingenuity of the Burgundian rhétoriqueurs’.3 All three indexes, as well as TM, to which the NIMEV entry redirects, give as the only witness for this fifteenth-century poem a single early-sixteenth-century manuscript, London, British Library, MS Arundel 26, fols 32v-33r. Now London, TNA, C 47/34/1/4 can be added as a second yet earliest witness of this lyric. The scribe of C 47/34/1/4 has written out the title on the right, preceded by the sole stanza on the left. The same hand has twice written the first word of the poem, ‘honnour’, with different degrees of abbreviation, on the reverse of the strip. The poem has been executed in an informal yet trained mid-fifteenth-century Anglicana hand, with single-compartment a and simple d, alongside several forms of r. Despite the differences in spelling between the two witnesses, word order and sense are consistent. This item has been included in volume 26 of the List and Index Society’s publications,4 where it is given as ‘“Balade Coloured and Reversed”, beginning: “Honnour and beaute vertu and gentilesse” (15 lines)’. The poem is not identified in this publication, nor does the IMEV appear to have been consulted at the time of publication since the entry counts the rhyme-royal stanza from NIMEV 4215 as part of NIMEV 1237/TM 605, given the misleading tally of 15 lines as a result of combining the two lyrics in C 47/34/1/4. The DIMEV entry for this poem, DIMEV 2052, muddies the waters by ascribing it to John Lydgate as ‘A Ballade to his Sovereign Mistress’ without giving a source or justification for this alternative title or attribution. Nowhere in the brief literature on (N)IMEV 1237 has this poem been associated with Lydgate, a circumstance that makes the DIMEV attribution as Lydgate’s ‘A Ballade to his Sovereign Mistress’ mysterious.5 The source of this confusion cannot have been IMEV or the Supplement, neither of which associate the poem with Lydgate or the title (‘A Ballade to His Sovereign Mistress’). As far as I can determine, the origin of this title and attribution can be traced back to a note published in 1998 by Stephen R. Reimer in this journal, ‘The Index of Middle English Verse: Some Corrections and Additions towards the Next Edition’.6 On p. 18 Reimer writes the following note: IMEV 1237, 'A Ballade to his Sovereign Mistress’; the Supplement includes a reference to an edition printed in 'Kirke, Reliquary IX. 76-7'; this slightly cryptic reference is to an article in The Reliquary, ix (1868-9), and the poem is printed on pp. 77-8, not 76-7.7 This is the first and, to my knowledge, only time that the title ‘A Ballade to his Sovereign Mistress’ is attached to IMEV 1237, albeit without an explanation. The content of the note corrects the pages for a nineteenth-century printing of the poem that does not mention the alternative title. Because Reimer’s article concentrates primarily on Lydgate, perhaps the editors of the DIMEV made the assumption that this was a Lydgate poem, adding a further error to Reimer’s mistake and creating a phantom poem by Lydgate. In a personal communication, Reimer kindly confirmed to me that this is not a poem by Lydgate but rather Lydgatiana, which explains the misreading on the part of DIMEV. Reimer could not determine how the poem came to bear the title ‘A Ballade to his Sovereign Mistress’, though it remains possible that the missing evidence may one day come to light. Until then, however, no testimony survives to suggest that a poem under this title exists, much less that it can be linked to Lydgate. The editors of NIMEV judiciously avoided the attribution to Lydgate, referring the reader instead to TM 605. But with a firm fifteenth-century witness for this poem, perhaps ‘Balade coloured And reuersed’ deserves to stand on its own. This work was made possible by a Dean’s Research Excellence Award from the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto, and an Insight Grant from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for the project ‘Communities of Practice: Scripts, Scribes, and the Production of Literature in London, 1377–1471’.

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