Professor Carleton Brown’s purpose, in this volume and the two in which he promises to deal similarly with the XIIIth and XVth century lyrics, is to represent, by a series of specimens arranged as far as possible in chronological order, the development of the religious lyric during the three centuries. In the present volume he illustrates the XIVth century with 135 poems, of which a fair number are printed for the first time, many given from better texts than those previously known, and all save one collated with the MSS. The apparatus criticus is comprehensive but concise: he postpones “a full Introduction to the fourteenth-century material until it can be discussed in connexion with the lyrics which preceded and followed.” While including half a dozen lyrics from MS. Harley 2253, the source of the well-known “Alysoun,” he hints that most of the religious lyrics in this MS. belong rather to the XIIIth century.
The largest group presented in this volume consists of twenty-six “refrain” poems from the Vernon MS. (Bodleian 3938), but most of these have been printed before. A new contribution is comprised in twenty-two lyrics from John Grimestone’s commonplace book (Advocates MS. 18. 7. 21), hitherto unprinted, though variants from other MSS. of some of the lyrics are known, It may be noted that Professor Carleton Brown does not infer from the statement “Iohannis de Grimistone … scripsit istum librum ” that John Grimestone was the author of the lyrics. But in the case of the fourteen hymns by Friar William Herebert, from Phillipps MS. 8336, some of which have previously appeared only in Reliquiæ Antiquæ (1841–3), there is, besides a direct statement that the Friar not only “in manu sua scripsit,” but also “transtulit [istos hymnos] in Anglicum,” an interesting confirmation thereof, in the shape of a pencil draft-translation of one hymn in Herebert’s handwriting on the margin of the Anglo-Norman original—the French texts being part of the same MS.
The fact that these lyrics, as well as many others in the volume, bear witness to the tendency of fourteenth-century preachers to introduce vernacular verse into their sermons, suggests that the
