BIOGRAPHICAL AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

BIOGRAPHICAL AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

ROBERT MANNING OF BRUNNE

ROBERT MANNING lived, perhaps as a canon, in various houses of the Gilbertine order in Lincolnshire. For a score of years, he tells us, he was in the priory of Brunnewake in Kesteven, six miles from Sempringham, in the extreme south of the county; and here in 1303 he began the Handling Sin, a free translation in 12,632 lines of William of Wadington's French Manuel des Pechiez. (Wadington is an insignificant place four miles south of Lincoln.) It is, he carefully explains, a manual of sins for unlearned people, treating of the ten commandments, the seven deadly sins, and the like, in purposely simple English, and garnished with sixty-five attractive tales more than the French version has. Of these the two in the text are fair samples, although the first is not in the French at all, and the second is much shorter there. The rest of our extract is valuable as illustrating the manners of the time; indeed the Handling Sin is an entertaining poem, and a worthy forerunner of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis. The other important work of Manning's is his Chronicle, finished about 1338 at the priory of Sixtill (or Six Hills), in the middle of Lincolnshire. The first part of this is a translation of Wace's Brut, the second of Pierre Langtoft's French Chronicle. Langtoft was born presumably at the hamlet of that name close to Brunne (or Bourne), and was Canon of Bridlington, on the Yorkshire coast. From such indications as these we can infer that there was a good deal of literary activity in the northern countries in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It is an odd little circumstance that at another Gilbertine house at which Robert Manning stayed-at Cambridge- he met Robert the Bruce, and was at a feast with Bruce's two brothers, one of whom "made a carved king," says Manning, "and was the best artist of his time."

The first part of the Chronicle has been edited by Thomas Hearne, Oxford, 1725, and the second by Furnivall, London, 1889; the Handling Sin, by Furnivall for the Early English Text Soc., London, 1901-03. The present text is Furnivall's with a few changes in punctuation and typography; thus the letters 3 and have been replaced by their modern equivalents, u and v distinguished, and the capitalization normalized.

THE GAWAIN POET

THE unknown author1 of four poems in the British Museum manuscript Cotton Nero A. X+4 is one of the most distinguished literary figures of the Middle Ages in England. The poems are The Pearl, Cleanness (or Purity), Patience, and Gawain and the Green Knight-all edited by R. Morris for the E. E. T. S., the first three in Early English Alliterative Poems, the last in Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight (revised by Gollancz, 1912); later editions of The Pearl by C. G. Osgood in the Belles Lettres Series, 1906, and by I. Gollancz, London, 1907; and of Patience by H. Bateson, Manchester, 1912. The Pearl is a highly finished elegy in an elaborate stanza; Gawain is a stirring Arthurian romance, informed with a beautiful spirit of honor and purity. Of these two we give complete translations, with a sample of the original text. Patience and Cleanness, of 500 and 1800 lines respectively, are written in the most powerful and highly colored alliterative verse, the former telling the story of Jonah, the latter Belshazzar's impious feast and fate.

1 It ought to be noted that the identification of the author of Gawain and the Green Knight with that of The Pearl, etc., is based on internal evidence and is not universally accepted.

These four, with Winner and Waster and The Parliament of the Three Ages (edited together by Gollancz for the Roxburghe Club, 1897) and the Thornton Morte Arthure (edited by Perry and Brock for the E. E. T. S., and by M. M. Banks, London, 1900; translation by A. Boyle in Everyman's Library), are the artistic culmination of the great alliterative revival of the fourteenth century. Of our author we know only what can be deduced from his works that he was a native of Lancashire or thereabouts, since he uses the NorthWest-Midland dialect; a person of chivalrous as well as religious feeling; highly educated, and conversant with the best society of his time. Guesses about his personality may be found in Gollancz aud Bateson. His work appears to fall within the third quarter of the fourteenth century.

The exact signification of The Pearl has of late been much discussed. The opinion that it is mainly a religious allegory written to support certain theological opinions, though cast with consummate skill into the form of an elegy, has made much headway since it was proposed by W. H. Schofield in the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. XIX (1904), p. 154; yet many scholars still prefer to consider that it is a genuine lament for a little child, and that the theological matter is secondary. Although a vision setting was one of the commonest devices of medieval poetry, as one may see in the Romance of the Rose, Dante, and Chaucer, the only piece known that bears any striking resemblance to The Pearl is Boccaccio's fourteenth eclogue, probably composed in 1360: their relationship is discussed in Schofield's article, p. 204, and in Osgood's introduction. The Pearl has been translated by Gollancz (1891), by S. Weir Mitchell (N. Y., 1906 incomplete), by G. C. Coulton (1906), by C. G. Osgood (1907), by Sophie Jewett (N. Y., 1908), and by Miss Jessie Weston (in Romance, Vision, and Satire, Boston, 1912).

Gawain and the Green Knight represents and crowns a great number of Gawain romances, most of which were collected by Sir Frederick Madden in his Sir Gawayne, edited for the Bannatyne Club in 1839. Gawain was originally the hero par excellence of the Round Table, a knight peerless for utter courage and courtesy. Other heroes in time and in turn became more popular than he, and in some of the French prose romances of the thirteenth century his character was defaced that others might appear to excel him; and Malory and Tennyson have unfortunately perpetuated the debased portrait. The immediate source of our poem was probably a lost French romance. The only editions are Madden's, which is rare, and Morris's, but a new one is preparing. Translations have been published by Miss Weston in Arthurian Romances Unrepresented in Malory's Morte d' Arthur, No. 1, London, 1898, in prose, and in Romance, Vision, and Satire in verse; by E. J. B. Kirtlan, London (1912), and by C. M. Lewis, New Haven, Conn., 1913 — the last a free retelling. Recent articles are those of Knott in Modern Language Notes, xxx (1915), p. 102, and Hulbert in Modern Philology, XIII (1915), p. 433. An important Study of Gawain and the Green Knight by Professor Kittredge has just been published, Cambridge, Mass., 1916.

The translations of The Pearl and Gawain and the Green Knight here offered were made in full knowledge of the difficulty, well-nigh futility, of the task, and aim simply at sticking close to the text and shirking none of the hard places.

WILLIAM LANGLAND

UPON the dubious evidence of notes in certain of the manuscripts the author of Piers Plowman is generally considered to be one William Langland, of Cleobury Mortimer in Shropshire; and by the equally unsafe method of identifying the Long Will of the poem with the author a sort of biography has been made out for him. But as a matter of fact the authorship is uncertain.

The poem itself was extremely popular, so that numerous manuscripts of it still exist. These fall into three groups, making three versions: the A text is a succinct vision concerning Piers the Plowman in eight passus, followed by four passus of the vision of Do Wel, Do Bet, and Do Best. This is usually termed the earliest version, written perhaps in