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 John the Blind Audelay
Poems and Carols
(Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302)
 p Middle English Texts Series p

General Editor
Russell A. Peck, University of Rochester
Associate Editor
Alan Lupack, University of Rochester
Assistant Editor
John H. Chandler, University of Rochester

Advisory Board
Theresa Coletti Michael Livingston
University of Maryland The Citadel
Rita Copeland R. A. Shoaf
University of Pennsylvania University of Florida
Susanna Fein Lynn Staley
Kent State University Colgate University
Thomas G. Hahn Paul E. Szarmach
University of Rochester The Medieval Academy of America
David A. Lawton Bonnie Wheeler
Washington University in St. Louis Southern Methodist University

The Middle English Texts Series is designed for classroom use. Its goal is to make available to teachers
and students texts that occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but have not
been readily available in student editions. The series does not include those authors, such as Chaucer,
Langland, or Malory, whose English works are normally in print in good student editions. The focus
is, instead, upon Middle English literature adjacent to those authors that teachers need in compiling the
syllabuses they wish to teach. The editions maintain the linguistic integrity of the original work but
within the parameters of modern reading conventions. The texts are printed in the modern alphabet
and follow the practices of modern capitalization, word formation, and punctuation. Manuscript
abbreviations are silently expanded, and u/v and j/i spellings are regularized according to modern
orthography. Yogh (h) is transcribed as g, gh, y, or s, according to the sound in Modern English
spelling to which it corresponds; thorn (þ) and eth (ð) are transcribed as th. Distinction between the
second person pronoun and the definite article is made by spelling the one thee and the other the,
and final -e that receives full syllabic value is accented (e.g., charité). Hard words, difficult phrases,
and unusual idioms are glossed on the page, either in the right margin or at the foot of the page.
Explanatory and textual notes appear at the end of the text, often along with a glossary. The editions
include short introductions on the history of the work, its merits and points of topical interest, and
brief working bibliographies.

This series is published in association with the University of Rochester.

Medieval Institute Publications is a program of

The Medieval Institute, College of Arts and Sciences
 John the Blind Audelay
Poems and Carols
(Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302)

Edited by
Susanna Fein

TEAMS • Middle English Texts Series

M edie val I nstitute Publicatio n s

Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo
 The Library of Congress has already cataloged the paperback as follows:

Audelay, John, fl. 1426.

Poems and carols : (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302) / John the Blind Audelay
; edited by Susanna Fein.
p. cm. -- (Middle English texts series)
Text in Middle English; critical material in English.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-58044-131-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Christian poetry, English (Middle) I. Fein, Susanna Greer. II. Bodleian Library.
Manuscript. Douce 302. III. Title.
PR1818.A93 2009
821'.2--dc22
2008047893

ISBN 978-1-58044-131-5
eISBN 978-1-58044-444-6

Copyright © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of Western Michigan University

 CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

INTRODUCTION 1

THE COUNSEL OF CONSCIENCE

[X.] TRUE LIVING 25
Instructions for Reading 1 31
XI. MARCOLF AND SOLOMON 32
[XV.] THE REMEDY OF NINE VIRTUES 64
XVI. SEVEN BLEEDINGS OF CHRIST 67
XVII. PRAYER ON CHRIST’S PASSION 70
XVIII. THE PSALTER OF THE PASSION 72
Instructions for Prayer 1 72
Latin Verse Prayer Anima Christi sanctifica me 72
Instructions for Prayer 2 72
Latin Verse Prayer O pendens dudum 72
Instructions for Prayer 3 73
Latin Verse Prayer O Deus qui voluisti 73
Latin Prose Prayer Tu Domine per has sanctissimas penas tuas 74
XIX. SEVEN WORDS OF CHRIST ON THE CROSS 74
XX. DEVOTIONS AT THE LEVATION OF CHRIST’S BODY 77
Instructions for Prayer 4 77
Salutation to Christ’s Body 77
Instructions for Prayer 5 79
Prayer for Pardon after the Levation 79
Latin Prose Prayer Adoramus te Christe et benedicimus 80
Latin Verse Prayer Laudes Deo dicam per secula 80
XXI. VIRTUES OF THE MASS 80
XXII. FOR REMISSION OF SINS 91
Saint Gregory’s Indulgence 91
Instructions for Prayer 6 92
Prayer of General Confession 92
Instructions for Prayer 7 93
Prayer for Forgiveness 93
XXIII. VISITING THE SICK AND CONSOLING THE NEEDY 93
BLIND AUDELAY’S ENGLISH PASSION 103
Instructions for Reading 2 103
On the World’s Folly 103
XXIIII. POPE JOHN’S PASSION OF OUR LORD 105
 Audelay’s Prayer Explicit to Pope John’s Passion 109
Seven Hours of the Cross 109
XXV. OUR LORD’S EPISTLE ON SUNDAY 112
XXVI. THE VISION OF SAINT PAUL 117
XXVII. THE LORD’S MERCY 126
God’s Address to Sinful Men 126
Audelay’s Epilogue to The Counsel of Conscience 134
Latin Prose Colophon Finito libro 146

SALUTATIONS
XXVIII. DEVOTIONS TO JESUS AND MARY HIS MOTHER 147
Salutation to Jesus for Mary’s Love 147
Prayer Rubric 151
Prayer on the Joys of the Virgin 151
Instructions for Prayer 8 151
XXIX. OTHER DEVOTIONS TO MARY 152
Salutation to Mary 152
Gabriel’s Salutation to the Virgin 155
XXX. SONG OF THE MAGNIFICAT 156
XXXI. SALUTATION TO SAINT BRIDGET 159
XXXII. DEVOTIONS TO SAINT WINIFRED 164
Saint Winifred Carol 164
Salutation to Saint Winifred 169
Latin Verse Prayer Virgo pia Wynfryda 171
Latin Prose Prayer Deus qui beatam virginem tuam Wenfrydam 171
XXXIII. DEVOTIONS TO SAINT ANNE 171
Salutation to Saint Anne 171
Latin Prose Prayer Deus qui beatam Annam 172
XXXIIII. MEDITATION ON THE HOLY FACE 173
Latin Instructions Quicumque hanc salutacionem 173
Drawing of the Holy Face on the Vernicle 173
Salutation to the Holy Face 173
Latin Prose Prayer Deus qui nobis signatum vultis 174

CAROLS
XXXV. CAROL SEQUENCE 175
Instructions for Reading 3 175
Carol 1. Ten Commandments 175
Carol 2. Seven Deadly Sins 176
Carol 3. Seven Works of Mercy 177
Carol 4. Five Wits 178
Carol 5. Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost 179
Carol 6. Day of the Nativity 180
Carol 7. Day of Saint Stephen 181
Carol 8. Day of Saint John the Evangelist 182
Carol 9. Day of the Holy Innocents 184
Carol 10. Saint Thomas Archbishop of Canterbury 185
Carol 11. Day of the Lord’s Circumcision 186
Carol 12. King Henry VI 188
 Carol 13. Four Estates 190
Carol 14. Childhood 192
Carol 15. Day of Epiphany 193
Carol 16. Saint Anne Mother of Mary 195
Carol 17. Jesus Flower of Jesse’s Tree 196
Carol 18. Joys of Mary 198
Carol 19. Mary Flower of Women 200
Carol 20. Chastity for Mary’s Love 201
Carol 21. Virginity of Maids 202
Carol 22. Chastity of Wives 203
Carol 23. Love of God 204
Carol 24. Dread of Death 206
Carol 25. Saint Francis 208

MEDITATIVE CLOSE
XXXVI. DEVOTIONAL PROSE 211
Instructions for Reading 4 211
The Sins of the Heart 211
Over-Hippers and Skippers 213
An Honest Bed 213
XXXVII. PATERNOSTER 216
XXXVIII. THREE DEAD KINGS 218
LATIN POEM CUR MUNDUS MILITAT SUB VANA GLORIA 222
AUDELAY’S CONCLUSION 224

EXPLANATORY NOTES 227

TEXTUAL NOTES 337

INDEX OF BIBLICAL REFERENCES 365

LINE INDICES 369

BIBLIOGRAPHY 373

GLOSSARY 383
This page intentionally left blank
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This edition, the first to present John Audelay’s book in its entirety, owes its existence
to the support and encouragement of many colleagues. My first debt is to Russell Peck and
Derek Pearsall, who urged me to undertake it. Familiar as I was with Audelay, it had not
occurred to me to edit his book until I was told it had to be done. Eventually I saw that they
were right.
Audelay’s opus is both rich and complex, and I find it necessary to sort these
acknowledgments in accordance with the chaplain’s own varied design. I have benefited
often from the wisdom of those who know individual texts well, and I remain deeply grateful
to have had ready access to the generosity and profound learning that typifies the
community of medievalists. Concerning the fascinating Piers-type poem Marcolf and Solomon,
I have had several rewarding discussions with Richard Firth Green, Derek Pearsall, and
James Simpson, and I am grateful to Fiona Somerset, Emily Steiner, and Lawrence Warner
for the welcome my work received at the 2007 Piers Plowman Conference in Philadelphia.
More broadly, regarding the multiple contents of The Counsel of Conscience, my knowledge
was enhanced by conversations and correspondences with Ann Astell, Robert Easting,
Robert Meyer-Lee, Ann Nichols, Veronica O’Mara, Oliver Pickering, Sue Powell, and
Martha Rust. In working on Audelay’s salutations section, I received valuable feedback from
Martha Driver, Sr. Mary Clemente Davlin, Ann Hutchinson, Melissa Jones, Miri Rubin, and
Christina von Nolcken, and I was honored to present portions of my findings at the
Devotion before Print Conference, University of Chicago, in April 2006. For Audelay’s carol
collection, I have gained much in conversations with Julia Boffey and John Hirsh. For the
devotional prose, I am indebted most of all to Ian Doyle, who generously answered my first
letters to him about the Audelay manuscript and its scribes more than a decade ago.
Regarding Three Dead Kings and its companion Paternoster, my debts are more widespread
than can be recounted here, but they include support and advice from Larry Benson, the
late Morton Bloomfield, Hoyt Duggan, Ruth Kennedy, Ashby Kinch, Sophie Oosterwijk, Ad
Putter, Eric Stanley, Thorlac Turville-Petre, and Kathryn Vulic. In sharing with me a desire
to see Audelay situated in his times, I must mention Michael Bennett, whose historical
investigations have given literary scholars a better sense of where to begin.
Other medievalists who have made a difference in my thinking about Audelay include
Tony Edwards, Alan Fletcher, Maureen Jurkowski, Michael Kuczynski, Linne Mooney,
Glending Olson, Helen Phillips, and Edward Wheatley, as well as several others with whom
I work in near proximity at Kent State University: Radd Ehrman, Elizabeth Howard, Kristen
Figg, John Block Friedman, Catherine Rock, and Isolde Thyret. To Radd I owe special
gratitude and respect as a resourceful, ever-cheerful comrade in securing accurate
translations and sources of Audelay’s Latin. It is his translation of Cur mundus militat that

ix
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

appears in this edition, and his learning graces the Latin translations throughout; any errors
that remain are wholly my own responsibility. I also thank my student Daryl Green.
I have been blessed with generous institutional support for this project. The Kent State
Research Council has granted me research release time as well as funds for travel to libraries
in the United Kingdom. The Institute for Bibliography and Editing along with the English
Department have given me moral and material support. The Middle English Texts Series
staff in Rochester — particularly John H. Chandler, Valerie Johnson, Michael Livingston, and
Russell Peck — have offered expert assistance and advice at every turn. I am also indebted to
Alan Lupack, who served as another editorial reader. I thank the helpful librarians at the
Bodleian Library (particularly Greg Colley and Tricia Buckingham), British Library, Kent
State University Library, Oberlin College Library (particularly Ed Vermue), Ohio State
University Library, and Stonyhurst College Library. I am grateful, too, to the National
Endowment for the Humanities for its generous support of the TEAMS editions, and to
editor Patricia Hollahan and the staff of Medieval Institute Publications, who are always a
pleasure to work with.
A personal note of gratitude goes to my family: to Carolyn, who typed carols into the
computer at an early phase of the project; to Elizabeth, who provided me with visuals for
an Audelay presentation on short notice; to Jonathan, who likes to suggest that the chaplain-
poet’s surname is oddly apt; and a profound thank you, as ever, to David.
 INTRODUCTION
The book is finished. Praise and glory be to Christ. The book is called The Counsel of Conscience, thus
is it named, or The Ladder of Heaven and the Life of Eternal Salvation. This book was composed by
John Audelay, chaplain, who was blind and deaf in his affliction, to the honor of our Lord Jesus Christ
and to serve as a model for others in the monastery of Haughmond. In the year 1426 A.D. May God
be propitious to his soul. (Finito libro colophon; MS Douce 302, fol. 22vb; translated from
Latin.)

Whose end is good, is himself entirely good. The book is finished. Praise and glory be to Christ. No
man remove this book, nor cut out any leaf, for I tell you, sirs, it would be a sacrilege! Be
accursed in this deed, truly! If you wish to have any copy, ask permission, and you shall have
[it], to pray for him especially who made it to save your souls, John the Blind Audelay. He
was the first priest of Lord Lestrange [assigned] to this chantry, here in this place, who made
this book by God’s grace — deaf, sick, blind, as he lay. May God be propitious to his soul.
(Audelay’s Conclusion, lines 40–52, MS Douce 302, fol. 34ra–b; translated from Latin and Mid-
dle English.)

Almost everything known about John the Blind Audelay, capellanus, is contained in the
medieval book edited here, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302. The passages quoted
above conclude two of its sections. They highlight a prominent feature of the book, that is,
how often it is stamped with the name of Audelay, as if to preserve his worldly memory and
ensure prayers for his soul’s salvation. But such recurrent passages, taken as contemporary
comments, are not without ambiguity. Does the closing benediction — “Cuius anime
propicietur Deus” (May God be propitious to his soul) — indicate that Audelay was already
dead when the scribe wrote it? Or is Audelay himself directing the scribe’s actions and
overseeing this commemorative performance on his own behalf? The answer would seem
to be the latter, that Audelay is still alive and close at hand, because the Middle English
portion of the second passage (rendered above in roman font) is composed in Audelay’s
favored 13-line stanza and dotted with his distinctive tags of moral admonition (“I tell you,
sirs, . . . truly!”). At the same time, the portrait of John the Blind Audelay drawn in this
stanza is set eerily in past tense, as if the poet were imagining himself as already a dead man
lying supine on his deathbed (“He was . . . he lay”).
The persistent naming of John the Blind Audelay in MS Douce 302 works overall to
make the book identifiable as an anthology of the collected works of an early fifteenth-cen-
tury poet. Poets in medieval England were virtually never broadcast by name in the way seen
here. This aspect of the Audelay manuscript represents something different and novel, and
it begs for an explanation, especially since most poetry of the period comes wrapped in blank
papers, that is, without any degree of scribal attribution or authorial self-naming. The creator
of the Audelay manuscript clearly relishes self-ascription. Audelay’s name appears sixteen
times on thirty-five vellum leaves, fourteen of those instances in Middle English verse and

1
2 POEMS AND CAROLS

two in Latin prose (in the colophon cited at the head of this introduction and the incipit of
a poem honoring Saint Bridget). The instances in Latin might have been provided by a
scribe, but, considering the general manner of the book, we may safely assume that they too
belong with the poet’s overt agenda of declaring his name from the leaves of a book.
The development of what has been called “the author collection” is a subject of some
interest as literary scholars seek to know how the sense of an “author” as an entity of author-
ized authority — that is, as a named writer whose works would merit an anthology — grad-
ually came into being in England sometime during the late fourteenth or early fifteenth cen-
tury. The evidence varies, of course, as one examines the various manuscripts containing
the attributed and nonattributed works of different writers — Chaucer, Hoccleve, Lydgate,
Gower, Langland, the anonymous works of Cotton Nero A.x. — and it differs according to
the criteria one chooses. One may, for example, examine an author’s own statements. When
in the lyric “Adam Scriveyn” Chaucer puts a curse upon the scribe who would miswrite his
words, he asserts as an author that his precise words do matter.1 In Troilus and Criseyde Chau-
cer pens another plea that his words not be altered:

And for ther is so gret diversite

In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge,
So prey I God that non myswrite the,
Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge. (V.1793–96)

Ralph Hanna calls Chaucer’s “awareness of the ways he might be misunderstood” both “fas-
tidious” and “prescient,”2 for it little agrees with the way medieval texts were typically repro-
duced with some indifference to textual variation.
The question of ascription may also be approached from the other end; that is, instead
of thinking about authorial authentication before the accidents of production, one may ex-
amine manuscripts for clues as to how an “anthologizing” impulse came to be exhibited by
compilers or scribes, with works variously attached to the names of their creators. From this
angle, the concept of Chaucer as an author to be named and collected in one place was not
as transparently simple as one might think. In the first decades after Chaucer’s death, the
idea does not seem, in A. S. G. Edwards’s wry phrase, “to have commended itself readily to
posterity.”3 Given the scarcity of direct attributions to Chaucer and the frequent mixing in
of Chaucerian and non-Chaucerian texts, Edwards concludes that “closed authorial collec-
tions of Chaucer’s works seem atypical: the more general anthologizing tendency was to

1
See especially Hanna’s chapter “Presenting Chaucer as Author,” pp. 174–94, in Pursuing History.
For other statements on medieval authorship and authority, see Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship;
and Machan’s chapter “Authority,” pp. 93–135, in Textual Criticism. Our view of Chaucer’s relation
to his scribe — perhaps identifiable as Adam Pinkhurst — is now much more historically nuanced as
a result of the exacting paleographical research of Mooney, “Chaucer’s Scribe.”
2
Hanna, Pursuing History, p. 175.
3
Edwards, “Fifteenth-Century Middle English Verse Author Collections,” p. 102; for Edwards’
discussion of Audelay, see p. 105. Attention has been paid in recent years to clarifying how medieval
anthologies differ from miscellanies. On this question, see, e.g., S. Nichols and Wenzel, Whole Book;
Lerer, “Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology”; and Fein, Studies in the Harley
Manuscript.
INTRODUCTION 3

mingle his own works with those of the emergent Chaucerian tradition, linking him with
Hoccleve, Clanvowe, Ros, and particularly Lydgate.”4
Against the backdrop of an emergent English literary tradition, the contents of MS
Douce 302, the Audelay manuscript, might seem inconsequential. Yet, in assessing how liter-
ary authorship was perceived and how books contributed to a budding culture of vernacular
canonicity, one must acknowledge the exceptional status that MS Douce 302 holds among
author collections of its day. Produced at a time when the authority of English writers was
still in flux, the Audelay manuscript stands at counterpoint to the prevailing trend to treat
attributions casually. As a book that ascribes texts with insistence to a contemporary English
author, it becomes a living account of what authority and authorship meant in a localized,
datable setting in medieval England.
There are, moreover, many other reasons for scholars of medieval English poetry to
read John Audelay’s book. His idiosyncratic devotional tastes, interesting personal life
history, and declared political affiliations — loyalty to king, upholder of estates, anxiety over
heresy — make him worthy of careful study beside his better-known contemporaries, for
example, John Lydgate, Thomas Hoccleve, and Margery Kempe, all of whom are objects
of recent renewed attention.5 Of particular note: MS Douce 302 preserves Audelay’s own
alliterative Marcolf and Solomon, a poem thought to be descended from Langland’s Piers
Plowman, though the nature of that relationship still requires better definition and better
historical-geographical situating. The Audelay manuscript also contains unique copies of
other alliterative poems of the ornate style seen in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The
Pistel of Swete Susan. These pieces are Paternoster and Three Dead Kings, both set at the end
of the book. Whether or not they are Audelay’s own compositions, they seem certain to be
his own selections, arranged in his anthology at a deliberate point for a decisive purpose,
that is, a sober meditation upon endings and death. Furthermore, to judge from the range
of verse styles in his book, Audelay was an aficionado of metrical variety and musical form.
In this regard, Audelay deserves keener recognition for his ordered collection of twenty-five
carols — not only because a sequence of this kind is rare but also because several individual
carols rank high among all medieval verse of this type. Audelay displays a persistent habit
of sequencing materials in generic and devotionally affective ways. His is a pious sensibility
delicately honed by reverence for liturgy and by an awe of God (and his saints) worshipped
by ritual. This aesthetic is perhaps most evident in Audelay’s salutations sequence, where he
is working in a genre little recognized for its artistic capabilities, and never before noted for
its sequential possibilities. That Audelay’s poetry can awaken us to new poetic sensitivities
in medieval devotional verse is reason enough to bring him into the ambit of canonical
fifteenth-century English poets.
The autobiographical element in many MS Douce 302 items is most poignantly featured
in the important poems Audelay’s Epilogue to The Counsel of Conscience and Audelay’s Conclusion.
These works provide revealing hints of a contrition-wracked soul moved to make open
declarations of himself as penitent chaplain, instructor of soulehele, and divinely inspired

4
Edwards, “Fifteenth-Century Middle English Verse Author Collections,” p. 103.
5
See Fein, “John Audelay and His Book.”
4 POEMS AND CAROLS

author. In signing his verse, Audelay patents a trademark stanza that blends penitential
modesty with egotistical assertion.6 A typical version appears in Our Lord’s Epistle on Sunday:

Mervel ye noght of this makyng —

Fore I me excuse, hit is not I. excuse myself
Fore this of Godis oun wrytyng this [work is created] by; own
That he send doun fro heven on hye,
Fore I couth never bot he foly. high folly
He hath me chastist for my levyng; chastised; living
I thonke my God, my Grace, treuly,
Of his gracious vesetyng. visiting [with affliction]
Beware, serys, I you pray, sirs
Fore I mad this with good entent,
Fore hit is Cristis comawndment;
Prays for me that beth present — Pray
My name hit is the Blynd Awdlay. (lines 196–208; italics added)

In this stanza Audelay denies that he is the true maker of the content. It is instead derived
from an inspired source — God, or (in other versions) Anselm, Paul, or the Holy Spirit.
Nonetheless, the stanza always ends with an emphasis upon the poetic maker’s name, “the
Blynd Awdlay,” after a statement that he, Audelay (with an emphatic “I”), did make the
verse with “good entent.”
The passages naming John the Blind Audelay are copied by both of Audelay’s two
scribes, indicating that they were knowledgeable accomplices in a program to preserve the
chaplain-poet’s name for posterity. Taking close notice of their shared labor helps to eluci-
date another ambiguity that hovers about the book’s biographical passages. How can it be
that Audelay “made” this book if he was, as he often attests, deaf and blind? Scholars agree
that this book, MS Douce 302, is the very codex referred to by Audelay when he writes that
he “made this bok by Goddus grace, / Deeff, sick, blynd” (Audelay’s Conclusion, line 51). Thus
the book itself serves as witness to the conditions of authorial production, and it may even
betray signs of the writing process itself. Although Audelay tells readers repeatedly that he
suffers disabilities of hearing and sight, it is inconceivable that he was both wholly blind and
wholly deaf during the process of making the book. He would have been, however, very
much dependent on his two scribes, and completion of the project probably required a
blended process of copying from exemplars, reading aloud, and correcting both by dictation
and by reference to written papers. Ultimately, then, the codicological side of the Audelay
manuscript is about observing the joint operations of three men who transformed Audelay’s
collected works into a physical book. They are:

First, Audelay himself, a secular chaplain retired to a chantry priesthood at Haughmond Ab-
bey in Shropshire, who planned and directed production of an anthology consisting of texts
he had authored in the broadest medieval sense of authorship — that is, created from

6
He follows this template five times in The Counsel of Conscience. The other instances are The Rem-
edy of Nine Virtues, lines 77–89, Visiting the Sick and Consoling the Needy, lines 378–90, The Vision of Saint
Paul, lines 353–65, and Audelay’s Epilogue to The Counsel of Conscience, lines 495–507, and he crafts
variations of it elsewhere.
INTRODUCTION 5

scratch, or translated, or paraphrased, or borrowed, or recombined in pastiche, or arranged

in meaningful sequences.

Second, Scribe A, probably a monk at Haughmond, who executed Audelay’s basic plan,
copying all but the last two texts in Audelay’s prescribed order, but leaving spaces for most
of the titles (incipits) and endings (explicits), and occasionally leaving gaps where his copy
was defective. Scribe A copied virtually all the signatures that occur within Audelay’s verse
compositions, so we know that he had direct access to Audelay’s conceptual plan (that is, the
living poet) and Audelay’s papers.

Third, Scribe B, probably another monk at Haughmond, who had the subsequent oversight
task of putting in the finishing touches. He added — in red ink — incipits, explicits, textual
pointers, small initials, and instructional couplets composed in tones that sound exactly like
Audelay. He also added — in blue and red ink — large initials and top-of-column numerals,
providing a visual ordinatio. Scribe B completed several texts left in a tentative state by Scribe
A, proofread and corrected the entire book, and extended the length of the book by adding
the two final items. He redacted the biographical passages cited above and put in other pas-
sages featuring Audelay’s name. Thus Scribe B also had direct access to Audelay and his
papers.7

In overall design, MS Douce 302 consists of four genre-based mini-anthologies, each

with its own internal arrangement in planned sequence. Somewhere between a quarter and
a third of the original book does not survive. The greatest loss occurs at the front, where up
to nineteen folios are gone.8 Noting how insistently are recorded John the Blind Audelay’s
authorship, mission, and moral example in MS Douce 302, we may safely guess that the lost
portions held yet more ascriptions to Audelay. While it is fruitless to speculate about the
genres or texts that might have figured among Audelay’s lost writings, it does seem likely
that the original book included a table of contents keyed to Scribe B’s numerals and a pre-
face (or opening rubric) meant to emphasize the prevailing presence of Blind Audelay as
pastoral author. An influential contemporary book may have been John Mirk’s Instructions
for Parish Priests, written a bit earlier at neighboring Lilleshall Abbey, also an Augustinian
house, and no doubt circulating actively among clerical communities in Shropshire when
Audelay’s book was made. Mirk’s verse Instructions for Parish Priests opens in the following
manner: “God says himself, as we find written, that when the blind lead the blind, into the
ditch they both fall, for they do not see where to go; so now do priests go by day.”9 Audelay
adopts the stance of the blind man leading the blind, but rightly led by God’s illuminating
light, while he continues in the manner of Mirk to correct the priesthood, as well as chastise
lapses among the other eccesiastical orders and the laity. In stating his own mission, Audelay
deploys the theological figure of the Book as the Word. In the last poem of the manuscript,
Audelay’s Conclusion, the poet asserts that the now-complete book conveys “my wyl and my
wrytyng” (line 33) while it bears spiritual similitude to “the bok of lyfe in hevun blys” (line 19).

7
For delineation of the division of scribal labor, see the explanatory notes on each text.
8
Fein, “Good Ends,” p. 98n3.
9
Lines 1–5, my translation. See Peacock, Instructions for Parish Priests by John Myrc, p. 1.
6 POEMS AND CAROLS

Ending upon another note evocative of Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests, the poet then asks
for prayers on his behalf and bequeaths the book to future readers for their spiritual benefit.10
Almost all of what we know about John the Blind Audelay is contained within the boards
of MS Douce 302. We are fortunate, though, to have one life-record for Audelay that is
external to the manuscript. A court document from London, dated April 1417, enumerates
the members of Lord Richard Lestrange’s retinue and includes the name of his chaplain,
John Audelay.11 This detail matches the information found in Audelay’s Conclusion. From the
circumstances of this record, we gain a glimpse of Audelay’s earlier life as a secular cleric who
traveled routinely to the capital in company with his patron. In this instance, the London
stay had a tragic outcome, with Lestrange committing and being arraigned for a high crime:
inciting a violent brawl in a London parish church, St. Dunstan’s-in-the-East, on Easter
Sunday, with a knight severely wounded and an innocent parishioner killed. For this
violation of God’s house on its most sacred day, Lestrange was jailed in the Tower and then
ordered to do penance in the streets of London, walking barefoot and in a plain shift with
his wife beside him, and followed by his retinue — including, presumably, his chaplain —
from St. Dunstan’s to St. Paul’s Cathedral. The notoriety and shame of this public spectacle
certainly dealt a blow to Lestrange, whose reputation in posterity rests on little else, and it
must also have set an indelible blot upon the conscience of John Audelay, Lestrange’s
spiritual advisor. Since the discovery in 1982 of Audelay’s part in this well-known scandal,
most scholars accept that Audelay’s penitential cast bears the scars of this episode of spiritual
and social trauma. Its effect on Audelay seems evident in his incessant expressions of contri-
tion and penance, as well as in his oft-repeated conviction that his ailments are visitations
from God, signs of divine punishment now and hoped-for mercy later.
The known facts about the life of John the Blind Audelay may be set out in brief space.
In the 1410s and 1420s he was chaplain to Lord Lestrange of Knockin, Shropshire, and
after a secular career in service to his patron, dishonorably marked by the shame of 1417,
he was appointed priest of the family chantry at nearby Haughmond Abbey, an Augustinian
house. Audelay calls himself the “furst prest” of the chantry, so his appointment would seem
to have been part of its initial endowment by Lestrange. Audelay need not have taken orders
as a monk to have been made one of the Haughmond community. His residence there would
have been a means by which Lestrange could provide him with a secure retirement after years
of active service. At the same time, Lestrange was purchasing the ongoing strength of the
chaplain’s prayers for the welfare of his own soul and those of family members, living and
deceased. Audelay’s role as chantry priest would have been to pray a specified number of
times for certain individuals, by name, on an ongoing quotidian basis. In this regard, the
preoccupation with naming that occurs in the Audelay manuscript is exceptionally pertinent
to Audelay’s daily existence.12
The making of the Audelay manuscript occurred during this period of Audelay’s life,
but parts of its contents, perhaps whole sections, were probably composed years before,
when Audelay’s vocation was as the master of religious instruction and devout entertainment
(that is, the singing of pious songs) within a secular household. One can see such materials
in each of its four parts — the quasi-liturgical sequences of prayers and indulgences in the

10
Peacock, Instructions for Parish Priests by John Myrc, pp. 59–60.
11
Bennett, “John Audley: Some New Evidence” and “John Audelay: Life Records.”
12
See Meyer-Lee, “Vatic Penitent.”
INTRODUCTION 7

acephalous penitential The Counsel of Conscience; the veneration of female saints and an in-
terest in their vitae in the Salutations; the convivial Carols, some of which are directed to wo-
men and seem meant for singing in a hall; and the Meditative Close, the part most congruent
with the codicological project of making a multi-section book that ends well, which is com-
prised of narrative, instructional, and allegorical texts that seem to target those in secular
life. Even as we may perceive the shades of this original audience, the book that survives de-
clares another group of readers. The Finito libro colophon asserts that the first section was
compiled “to serve as a model for others in the monastery of Haughmond.” So to under-
stand the reception of Audelay’s works, we must imagine different audiences in different
phases of Audelay’s life: the secular nobles of Audelay’s active career with Lord Lestrange;
the monks who surround him in his later life, when he devotes himself to the anthologizing
project; and perhaps, too, an ongoing reception by laity (such as Lestrange) who visit the
chantry and know about Audelay by past association, present reputation, or both.13
The year 1426, the only exact date found written in the folios of MS Douce 302, appears
in the Finito libro colophon, at a point two-thirds of the way into the manuscript, and it refers
only to The Counsel of Conscience. The date does not necessarily designate, therefore, the year
of the making of the whole manuscript or its textual elements. The copying of texts into MS
Douce 302, during which The Counsel of Conscience was teamed with other works, could have
occurred later than 1426. For example, it is plausible that Audelay’s King Henry VI was
written after 1426; if it was composed in celebration of the young king’s coronation, as
Rossell Hope Robbins assumes, then its date would be 1429 or 1431.14 On the other hand,
Marcolf and Solomon (the second work found in the manuscript) is usually ascribed a much
earlier date, that is, probably before 1414, because it seems to reflect the political climate
prior to the Oldcastle uprising.15 Numerous poems by Audelay, especially the carols, contain
borrowings from True Living (the first piece in MS Douce 302), so it may be that this item is
the oldest work in the book, and that the lost works copied before it were older still.16 The in-
ternal dating questions are thus complex, and the best we may do at this point in our knowl-
edge is assign an approximate range for the manuscript itself, c. 1426–31, because the colo-
phon date tells us neither the date of the book’s creation nor the year of Audelay’s death.
There is, moreover, evidence that the process for ending the book was a drawn-out one, oc-
curring three separate times: first, when Scribe A finished his copy; then later, when Scribe
B appended a Latin moral poem; and finally, when Scribe B inscribed the last poem — the
poet’s address to the reader. This sequence of endings suggests a poet who, living beyond
the book’s original conception, takes a continuing interest in its closing formulation.17

13
It is impossible to say how far Audelay’s influence or fame extended beyond the abbey walls.
Evidence in the book suggests that Audelay cultivated a persona as blind prophet and public penitent.
See Fein, “Good Ends,” pp. 101–03.
14
Robbins, Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, p. 108. See also the explanatory note
for King Henry VI, lines 63–64. A later date for this carol would also pertain to the entire carol
collection, for it is a composed set.
15
See explanatory notes to Marcolf and Solomon, lines 242, 501, and 503.
16
This possibility is suggested by Pickering in “Make-Up,” pp. 120, 131–32.
17
Fein, “Death and the Colophon in the Audelay Manuscript.”
8 POEMS AND CAROLS

THE COUNSEL OF CONSCIENCE

The long colophon on fol. 22v gives the first section of Audelay’s anthology a dual title:
The Counsel of Conscience or The Ladder of Heaven and the Life of Eternal Salvation. These two
titles suggest the purpose of this first Audelay “book.” The chaplain Audelay urges readers
to cleanse their souls through contrition and confession, to submit humbly to priestly coun-
sel based in the teachings of Holy Church, and to advance steadily toward heaven through
a well-governed life of good deeds. The two titles (the second one abridged to The Ladder
of Heaven) also appear in the last work of The Counsel of Conscience, Audelay’s Epilogue to The
Counsel of Conscience (lines 417–18). While we thus know exactly where The Counsel of Con-
science ends, we cannot be sure, as Oliver Pickering has pointed out, just where it begins.18
The dual title does, however, characterize all the contents that survive before the colophon,
with an explicit theme of soulehele being raised as early as Marcolf and Solomon (lines 526,
798) and mentioned again in Audelay’s Epilogue to The Counsel of Conscience (line 105).19
The Counsel of Conscience seems a miscellaneous mix of texts because the genres con-
tained in it vary a good deal: prayer and Passion meditation, instructions on the mass and
tenets of the faith, salutation, pious exhortation, truth-telling voiced by God himself, and
even a semi-satiric admonition of the ecclesiastical orders. The poem of the last type is
Audelay’s Marcolf and Solomon, which is famously written in an alliterative style evocative of
Piers Plowman. Yet all works found in The Counsel of Conscience commonly preach with insist-
ence about penance, and they deliver this message in Audelay’s distinctive tones. Many texts
are based on models (Latin or English) that exist elsewhere, but still they are transmuted into
Audelay’s idiosyncratic voice. Taken together, the works in The Counsel of Conscience provide
a representative sampling of the variety of texts of popular devotion promulgated for lay
use in fifteenth-century England, and they are far too centered on the veneration of saints,
belief in indulgences, and orthodox pastoral practice to invite any sustainable charge of Lol-
lardy, which Audelay nonetheless earnestly denies.20
Audelay’s Counsel of Conscience contains, furthermore, several internal symmetries and
recurrent interests, which are evident particularly in its frequent evocations of Passion imagery
to be paired with thoughts of reverent things grouped by mystical number, especially the
number seven: seven bleedings, seven words on the cross, seven hours of the cross, often to
be blended penitentially with thoughts of the seven deadly sins, seven works of mercy, and
so on. Many prayers and devotions are grouped in quasi-liturgical sequences, with Audelay
poised as the chaplain who leads a congregation or an individual congregant. Study of the
many analogues and sources, as well as manuscript indicators, show that he ranged un-self-
consciously among a variety of compositional methods: translation from Latin to foster lay
understanding; free borrowings from other works and free elaborations; imaginative
metrical restylings, with a real preference for a distinctive 13-line stanza; knowledge of
many literary types, such as refrain poems and dream visions; original sequencings that mix

18
Pickering, “Make-Up,” p. 114.
19
See also Virtues of the Mass, line 3 (and explanatory note). “Sawlehele” is the title applied to the
Vernon MS by its compiler; see explanatory note to Audelay’s Epilogue to The Counsel of Conscience, line
105.
20
See explanatory notes to Marcolf and Solomon, lines 131–43, 501, 678–88, and to Audelay’s
Epilogue to The Counsel of Conscience, lines 248–60; and Fein, “Good Ends,” p. 100n9.
INTRODUCTION 9

old hymns and devotions with fresh instructions and prayers; authorial signposts and
marginal asides to readers; and so on.21
The unity of The Counsel of Conscience rests in its persistent method of instruction on how
to gain indulgence for one’s sin. The book is in essence a handbook for the remission of
sins, with sinfulness understood as a specific quantity of willfully evil deeds and thoughts
counted against one’s soul. Thus, penitential acts are needed to reduce the tally, which will
come to account when God affixes to each soul its final judgment. Audelay offers ways to
avoid hell, where there is no respite from pain other than the mercy offered on Sundays, as
explained in The Vision of Saint Paul. Hopeful that his readers will heed his warning and
escape hell’s tortures, Audelay offers additional advice on how, in this life, one may reduce
one’s term of agony in purgatory and thus hasten the way to heaven. Audelay’s guidelines
are literal and detailed, and they are based not only on Church teaching but on the author-
ity of exemplary churchmen who have offered such counsel through pious writings or specif-
ic prayers that would smooth the way. Thus Audelay’s emphasis upon words and authority
comes about not for the same reason that Chaucer asks readers and scribes to respect his
exact text, but because one is to pray certain words in certain ways in order to receive a spe-
cific quantity of remission. Sometimes the instructions are general, sometimes particularized,
but they are ever-present in the collected texts of The Counsel of Conscience, and always the
goal is clear and literal. In the first two works — the acephalous True Living (line 122) and
the alliterative Marcolf and Solomon (line 39) — we are told to please God and to keep his
commandments (i.e., follow his Word) to receive remission of sins.22 Then in the third work,
The Remedy of Nine Virtues, the ventriloquized voice of Christ counsels us to use our free will
wisely and to depend upon the assembled saints of heaven to pray for us:

Yif thou fall, aryse anon,

And call to me with contricion;
Then my moder and sayntis uchon
Wil fore thee pray. (lines 34–37)

Mary and the heavenly body of saints live in Audelay’s poem, and they await the call to pray
effectively to save souls.
The remaining texts of The Counsel of Conscience assert by authority of a named holy
presence that such-and-such action or prayer will grant him who is truly penitent an indul-
gence, which is said to be offered by ultimate authority of God. The first is a prayer on
Christ’s blood, requesting remission of sins: the reader is told to say this prayer every day
and worship every wound of Christ in order to gain a place in heaven; should he teach it to
another, his salvation will be secure (Seven Bleedings of Christ, lines 110–39). Next is the
Prayer on Christ’s Passion; he who says this prayer every day will gain remission of sins (lines

21
Two other manuscripts that appear to contain pastoral agendas similar to Audelay’s The Counsel
of Conscience are London, British Library MS Harley 3954 and Cambridge University Library MS Ii.4.9.
22
The interesting poem Marcolf and Solomon has often been seen as belonging to the Piers
Plowman tradition because of, for example, the appearance of Mede the Maiden and some apparent
verbal echoes; see the explanatory notes to Marcolf and Solomon, lines 490–95, 705, and 937–43. On
the Langland and Audelay connection, see especially Green, “Marcolf the Fool and Blind John
Audelay”; Simpson, “Saving Satire after Arundel’s Constitutions”; Pearsall, “Audelay’s Marcolf and
Solomon and the Langlandian Tradition”; and Green, “Langland and Audelay.”
10 POEMS AND CAROLS

37–42). Then appears The Psalter of the Passion, a sequence of Latin prayers with English in-
structions that explain how its recitation brings remission of sins. The first of these prayers,
the Latin hymn Anima Christi sanctifica me, was indulgenced at Avignon in 1330 by Pope John
XXII.23 The pious reader is told to follow this petition with another prayer, then an Ave, and
then a third prayer recited with one’s rosary beads, followed by the Creed and a last prayer
in Latin prose provided by Audelay.
After the prayer sequence Audelay asks a devout reader to commemorate the seven
words uttered by Christ on the cross, which serve mystically to allow the seven deadly sins to
be remitted (Seven Words of Christ on the Cross, lines 1–12). Each holy utterance becomes the
focal point for a two-stanza meditation, in which, after it is cited, it is then appended to a pe-
tition on behalf of the reader. For example, Christ’s words “Father, forgive them, for they
know not what they do” (Luke 23:34) lead to a petition that God forgive the petitioner’s ene-
mies (lines 13–24). Finally, in order to worship properly these seven words, the petitioner
is to say seven Paternosters and seven Aves (lines 99–100). And, just as Christ granted
remission to his tormentors, Audelay tells us, “Well is he who will worship devoutly these
words every day, for he shall have plain remission” (lines 109–14).
Audelay’s overriding concern for remission of sins based in God’s authoritative grace
continues to dictate the next sequence, Devotions at the Levation of Christ’s Body, which con-
tains instructions, a salutation, and prayers in English and Latin. This text prepares a wor-
shipper to venerate appropriately, in mind and gesture, the moment at which the host is
raised in the mass. Upon the enactment of this holy event, an early reader (not one of the
scribes) highlights the word “assencion” by drawing in the right margin a sleeved hand
pointing upward at the word, which also marks the center of Audelay’s poem (Salutation to
Christ’s Body, line 26). The next of Audelay’s texts is a verse sermon, Virtues of the Mass, which
follows logically the Levation sequence. In Virtues of the Mass Audelay names Saints Bernard,
Bede, Augustine, and Gregory as authorities on the mass, and he offers an amusing, well-
disseminated exemplum — here told as an anecdote of Augustine and Gregory — on the
evils of gossip during the holy service (lines 298–342). To this lengthy poem on the benefits
of the mass, which is also found in variant form in the Vernon Manuscript, Audelay adds his
own ending, in which he tells the reader how to gain protection throughout the work week
by praying during the service in a specific manner: pray for oneself, for one’s parents and
kin, for the weather, and for peace; then say three Paternosters to Christ, five to God, and
seven to the Holy Ghost for one’s seven deadly sins; then say ten more for the breaking of
the Ten Commandments; and, finally, for having heard this sermon, the reader will gain,
according to Saint Gregory, one hundred days of pardon (lines 352–414).
From this point on in The Counsel of Conscience, the ascriptions to the authority of holy
men multiply. In the prayer sequence For Remission of Sins, Audelay prefaces the Prayer of
General Confession (given in English) with an explanation of how it is part of an indulgence
granted by Saint Gregory, for which one is granted 14,000 years of pardon, with more years
added by other bishops (Saint Gregory’s Indulgence, lines 1–10). Here Audelay instructs one
to say five Paternosters and five Aves, and then to say the prayer kneeling where it is painted
on the wall. The next work, Visiting the Sick and Consoling the Needy, which Audelay attributes
to Saint Anselm as he renders it in his own idiomatic 13-line stanza, is a consolation for
those afflicted by God for their sins, preaching that Peter, Mary Magdalene, and Thomas

23
Ker, Facsimile of British Museum MS. Harley 2253, p. x.
INTRODUCTION 11

are exemplars of God’s mercy extended to sinners. Its basic message is to prepare for “soden
deth” (line 395). Next comes a sequence that Audelay calls, interestingly, Blind Audelay’s
English Passion, in which the central work is Pope John’s Passion of Our Lord, which offers three
hundred days of remission (line 5). According to Audelay, Pope John made this meditation
three days before he died. After reading it devoutly, one should say five Paternosters in
worship of the Passion, then five Aves kneeling in reverence of the five wounds, and finally
the Creed, to order to obtain the promised remission (line 119). After meditation upon the
Passion comes (as with Seven Words of Christ on the Cross following The Psalter of the Passion)
a meditation on a mnemonic seven holy things. This time the focus is upon the Seven Hours
of the Cross, which offers a prayer that the reader’s sins be remitted should he keep this text
devoutly in mind (lines 77–90).
The next two works, Our Lord’s Epistle on Sunday and The Vision of Saint Paul, are trans-
lations by Audelay of Latin texts that are frequently paired in other manuscripts. Audelay
also juxtaposes them purposefully, rendering both in his favored 13-line stanza. In a rubric
supplied by Scribe A, Our Lord’s Epistle on Sunday is said to be originally transmitted through
Saint Peter, bishop of Gaza. The Sunday Letter reveals a truth sworn to by all the saints,
written as it was by Christ’s own fingers, and it grants remission (line 172). This item
connects readily to the one that follows it, The Vision of Saint Paul, where the opening lines
declare that it was on a Sunday that Paul and the Archangel Michael traveled together to
view the pains of souls in hell (lines 1–6). Although Christ declares that there is no remission
in hell, this dictum will be mercifully alleviated after the visit of Saint Paul: the souls of hell
are now to be offered relief on Sundays (lines 296–300). This highly visual narrative poem,
which paints starkly the sufferings of sinners in hell as viewed by an astonished Paul, closes
with one of Audelay’s many signature stanzas. Here Audelay attributes authorship of the
poem to God, through the witness of Paul:

Mervel ye not of this makyng —

Y me excuse, hit is not I.
Thus Mychael lad Powle, be Goddis bedyng,
To se in hel the turmentré,
Fore I couth never bot hy foly.
God hath me chastyst fore my levyng; chastised
...............................
Thus counsels youe the Blynd Audlay. (lines 353–58, 365)

And now comes the closing movement of The Counsel of Conscience. Audelay ends this
long book at the front of MS Douce 302 with a last sequence of two poems and a colophon,
to which his second scribe assigns the heading The Lord’s Mercy (“De misericordia Domini”).
The topic of God’s grace allows a smooth transition out of the visionary climax featured in
the last poem, closing the book with the hoped-for soulehele. The first poem in this final se-
quence, God’s Address to Sinful Men, returns the authorial voice to God, as in The Remedy of
Nine Virtues and Our Lord’s Epistle on Sunday. In 8-line stanzas with a Latin refrain,24 God

24
“Nolo mortem peccatoris” (“I desire not the death of the wicked,” Ezechiel 33:11). On Audelay’s
frequent use of this biblical passage, compare True Living, line 128; Marcolf and Solomon, line 790; Our
Lord’s Epistle on Sunday, line 115; and the explicit to The Vision of Saint Paul. It may hold a contemporary
resonance in regard to correction of Lollards, for it occurs in a confession of heresy made by a Suffolk
12 POEMS AND CAROLS

issues stern warnings to mankind while continuously offering remission in return for
heartfelt contrition. The next poem, Audelay’s Epilogue to The Counsel of Conscience, makes the
subject personal. The chaplain composes this work in his own voice, with a first-person,
prophetic-sounding “I,” and in his own trademark 13-line stanza. The poem even bears a
hint of dream-vision framing in the third stanza

Fore as I lay seke, in my dremyng, sick

Methoght a mon to me con say: It seemed to me; did say
“Let be thi slouth and thi slomeryng! slumbering
Have mynd on God both nyght and day!” (lines 27–30)

paired with the penultimate stanza (lines 482–94), which begins “As I lay seke in my
langure.”
In Audelay’s Epilogue to The Counsel of Conscience Audelay betrays a personal hope that his
visitation from God — that is, his being struck with blindness — is something that may as-
sociate him with Saint Paul,25 give him license to speak truth, and ultimately lead to his
redemption:

And take record of the apostil Poule heed

That Crist callid to grace and his mercé,
Fore so I hope he hath done me
And geven me wil, wit, tyme, and space,
Throgh the Holé Gost, blynd, def to be,
And say this wordis throgh his gret grace. (lines 16-21) these

Audelay harbors a belief that his words may acquire an authoritative power akin to those of
the apostle. Finally, this last poem in The Counsel of Conscience closes with another signature
stanza, this one attributing the written words to the Holy Ghost:

Mervel ye not of this makyng, Marvel

Fore I me excuse — hit is not I; excuse myself
This was the Holé Gost wercheng, Holy Ghost’s making
That sayd these wordis so faythfully,
Fore I quoth never bot hye foly. I [myself] say; high folly
...........................
Beware, seris, I youe pray,
Fore I mad this with good entent,
In the reverens of God Omnipotent.
Prays fore me that beth present — [those] who are
My name is Jon the Blynd Awdlay. (lines 495–99, 503–07)

Audelay closes the book by attributing, again, the primary creative act to a higher authority
— either the Deity or one with sainted proximity to the Deity — while he then turns around
and claims the secondary act as his own. Audelay’s modest form of “makyng,” we might

priest in 1429, as cited in Shinners and Dohar, Pastors and the Care of Souls in Medieval England, p. 280.
25
This is one of many instances where Audelay makes spiritual reference to blindness; see Fein,
“Good Ends,” p. 101n11.
INTRODUCTION 13

glean, refers mainly to actions of translating and metering, and seldom in his mind to any
claim of original content.

SALUTATIONS

The salutation section directs the worship of Audelay and his pious readers toward five
holy figures: the Virgin Mary, three women saints (Bridget, Winifred, and Anne), and even-
tually God himself, whose image is mediated by the agency of another woman, Saint Veron-
ica. The final approach to God is by means of an image of the Holy Face as preserved upon
the Vernicle. These salutations provide the words by which to honor and invoke saints, sum-
moning them by name, as in the first one to Mary:

Hayle, Maré, to thee I say,

Hayle, ful of grace, God is with thee.
Hale, blessid mot thou be, thou swete may. may; virgin
(Salutation to Jesus for Mary’s Love, lines 1–3)

The poems in this section seem sometimes to be directed at a faithful congregation, as when
Scribe A inserts the word “Oremus” (Let us pray) and Scribe B adds “collecte” (together)
before each of the three prayers in Latin prose. Yet the drawing of God’s face upon the Ve-
ronica Shroud that occurs at the end of the salutations is expressly bookish in constructing
a meditative site for a person practicing his quiet devotions. The act of reading piously and
privately, as figured by a book of devotional verse, and the coherent religious logic of the
sequence itself, punctuated with clerical instructions, suggest that Audelay envisions his salu-
tations as bringing comfort and spiritual well-being to individual users.
The salutations devoted to the worship of Mary lead off the section in a way that sug-
gests that the mother of God is to be seen as the primary intercessory figure for the whole
section. The word by which to hail her, “Ave,” is essentially synonymous with the genre itself,
and Gabriel’s utterance of this word to the Virgin — in the Annunciation — is the prototypical
salutation, the word that prefaced incarnation of the Word. Interestingly, this section becomes
a kind of dialogue with the Virgin. The first incipit invites this dialogue by asking the reader
not to pass by, but to pause and say “Ave.” Then (in the same incipit) the Virgin herself
speaks to the reader, pronouncing, with a delicate pun on ave (hail) and a ve (without woe),
the rewards that accrue to those who salute her: “May they always be without woe who to me
say ‘Ave.’” The Marian section then moves from salutation and prayer into a healing medita-
tion upon the Virgin’s five joys, then another salutation to Mary, a delicate lyric translation
of the Latin hymn Angelus ad Virginem (voiced by Gabriel), and finally, continuing the biblical
reference to Luke 1, a version of the Song of the Magnificat (voiced, of course, by Mary) in
refrain stanzas. Thus the Marian salutations operate as a chorus of modulated voices in
praise of Mary, with even Mary herself participating, as if in conversation with the medieval
person who says “Ave.”
The first of the salutations to Mary has an astonishing structure by which it encloses an
embedded salutation to Jesus as Redeemer. The poem assumes a form in imitation of Mary’s
pregnancy, as if it were a statue of the Virgin that can be opened to reveal the Blessed Child
within. This first salutation, which begins in seeming address to Mary alone, reveals itself
to be actually an address to Jesus through Mary and her five joys, and it movingly dramatizes
the impossibility for an Englishman of orthodox faith to approach God without a mediating
14 POEMS AND CAROLS

presence (a stance much challenged by Lollards). In this internal salutation to Mary’s Son,
the verse reiterates the name of Jesus for some seventy lines: “O Jhesu, fore these Joys Fyve,
/ O Jhesu, thi moder had of thee” (Salutation to Jesus for Mary’s Love, lines 91–92), and so on.
Moreover, during this worship in direct address to Jesus, Audelay’s professed hope for the
sight of God’s face at Doomsday (lines 150–51) anticipates the way he will close his saluta-
tions section.
After this well-integrated cluster of Marian salutations come the poems dedicated to
Saints Bridget, Winifred, and Anne, female saints who are each venerated for the miraculous
healing powers associated with their sanctity. Bridget of Sweden was canonized as saint in
1391. Audelay’s salutation to her bears significant historical witness to the founding of the
Bridgettine order in England, which resulted in the establishment of Syon Abbey by Henry
V’s royal decree in 1415. In the poem Audelay compliments “gracious Kyng Herré” for this
noble promotion of the faith in England (lines 136–48), and elsewhere, in his carol King
Henry VI, there also surfaces the chaplain’s patriotic desire to praise the reigning
Lancastrian monarchy. The Salutation to Saint Bridget narrates the saint’s vita at some length,
and it stands alone without accompanying apparatus, while the salutations to Winifred and
Anne are set within devotional sequences that include prayers to the saintly women.
The Winifred devotion is actually a double salutation for there are two poems to honor
her, one in carol form (the only carol outside the carols section of the manuscript) and one
in a 9-line stanza that is identical to that used by Audelay in his lengthy Salutation to Saint
Bridget.26 Two Latin prayers, one in verse, one in prose, conclude the devotion. While Wini-
fred’s vita is set in seventh-century Wales, Audelay and the residents of Haughmond Abbey
would have viewed her as a local saint because her relics rested in Shrewsbury, four miles
to the north, having been translated there in 1138. Moreover, Winifred’s popularity had
widened when her feast day was made binding throughout England in 1415. An effigy of
Winifred stands among those carved in the outside arches of the abbey chapter house, where
her foot rests upon the head of Prince Caradoc, an iconographic gesture that ironically re-
verses the most famous moment in her vita: when the prince found he could not deflower
her, he decapitated her in a furious rage, but her uncle restored her head to her body, and
Winifred lived thereafter with a thin white thread of scar adorning her neck as a necklace.
One of Audelay’s prayers to Winifred emphasizes the saint’s miraculous restoration to bodily
wholeness, which pertains to her power to heal others, such as himself.
Womanly healing in the form of miraculous fertility, leading to the birth of the Savior,
forms the focus of the devotion to Saint Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary. This sweetly
graceful worship service possesses two parts: an English verse salutation and a Latin prose
prayer. Audelay emphasizes in both elements the miracle of Anne’s fruitful womb, which
gave birth to Mary after a long period of barrenness. As with Winifred, Audelay composed
two poems in honor of Anne — an anaphoric salutation and a carol — but he situates Saint
Anne Mother of Mary in the next section of carols, where it is located, significantly, in a series
given to the topic of chaste female fecundity. The wondrous quality of Anne’s unexpected
fertility, leading to the birth of Mary and later Christ, contributes to the conceptual theme
of miraculous healing that runs through the salutations.

26
It may be that Audelay planned or executed a series of salutations for female saints in this
meter, and that these two poems are the only remaining vestige of that plan. The meter resembles
that used for Marcolf and Solomon; see explanatory notes to Salutation to Saint Winifred.
INTRODUCTION 15

In the last devotional sequence, dedicated to the Holy Face, God’s image is venerated
by means of a salutation and a drawing — the only non-marginal illustration to occur in MS
Douce 302. The sequence opens with Latin prose instructions that identify the English salu-
tation (with drawing) as an indulgence from Rome granted by Pope Boniface IV, which
should be said twenty days in a row. The drawing of Christ’s face on the Veronica Shroud
follows these instructions and forms a visual meditative site. It resembles one of a series
commonly found on indulgence rolls that venerate the Arma Christi, a tradition also occur-
ring in Audelay’s Seven Bleedings of Christ (lines 67–72). When Scribe A came to this point
in the manuscript, that is, the end of the salutations, he left space for the drawing and in-
scribed the verbal exercise Salutation to the Holy Face and the final Latin prose prayer below
that space. The drawing appears to have been inserted later by Scribe B. Thus the image
and the English salutation support vernacular devotion, but it is mediated through a clerical
frame of Latin prose instruction and prayer.
It appears that Audelay has designed the series of salutations so that a meditant is
deliberately brought to this climactic image and textual moment, which rehearses the much-
anticipated sight of God’s Holy Face on Doomsday, to which the opening Salutation to Jesus
for Mary’s Love referred. Viewed as a unified set, Audelay’s salutations develop aesthetic
wholeness from sacred logic, progressing from God in Mary’s womb, in the Salutation to Jesus
for Mary’s Love, to God upon the sudary of Veronica, in the Salutation to the Holy Face. In
each, God is imaged in human form and made accessible by the mediation of female sanctity
and clerical guidance. Soulehele as conceived of in this section arrives by means of holy
women.

CAROLS

Twenty-five in number, Audelay’s carols are a thoughtfully arranged collection, the first
known grouping of its kind. They are arranged by topic: articles of faith; feasts of the Church;
support of king and social order; honor to the holy family; praise of virginity, chastity, and
love of God; a holy fear of death; and, last of all, honor to Saint Francis, promoter of vernac-
ular Christian song. The Audelay manuscript eventually fell into the hands of a minstrel, late
in the fifteenth century, and one reason for this may be that the minstrel, William Wyatt of
Coventry, wanted copies of these carols.27 Their character is more religious than secular,
and while the manuscript does not contain music, they were likely meant to be sung: as the
headnote proclaims, “Syng these caroles in Cristemas.” It may be that some of the longer
ones were designed more for reading; these include the ceremonial carols dedicated to
Henry VI and Saint Francis. Another long carol, dedicated to Saint Winifred, is copied in
the salutations section, where it fits into a longer devotion to that saint. The fact of its exis-
tence, and the nicety of the number twenty-five, would seem to suggest that Audelay might
have composed, during the course of his chaplaincy, other carols that are now lost, and that
this well-planned sequence results from a process of selection mixed with a process of new
composition directed purposefully toward the making of this anthology.
Determining when and for what occasions Audelay originally composed these carols is
complicated by several factors. Because six of the carols appear in similar or variant forms
in other manuscripts, it would seem that Audelay may have borrowed them from other

27
Fein, “John Audelay and His Book,” pp. 4, 12–13.
16 POEMS AND CAROLS

sources. In most cases where duplicates exist elsewhere, scholars have tended to question
Audelay’s role in the composition process,28 but it is also possible that some of these songs
were indeed Audelay’s own and that the other copies indicate a multi-regional dispersal of
Audelay’s works, his carols especially. There are certain carols that bear sophisticated lyrical
or metrical charms that seem to soar beyond Audelay’s normal poetic range. Examples in-
clude Day of the Lord’s Circumcision, Day of Epiphany, Jesus Flower of Jesse’s Tree, and Joys of
Mary, all of which appear in other manuscripts. Moreover, scribal actions sometimes tell us
that copies were sought by unusual means. When Scribe A redacted Day of the Lord’s Circumci-
sion, it appears that he lacked it in complete form, and Scribe B later located and supplied
it. What this initial tentativeness may indicate about authorship is, however, uncertain.29 The
carols most definitely Audelay’s own are those composed in either of the two dominant met-
rical modes — a 7-line stanza and a 6-line stanza — for which there were surely tunes that
were familiar. Audelay’s own idiom, however, is ever-present, and the idea of the sequence
and its execution are certainly Audelay’s own creations.
The unity of the collection can be conceived of, roughly, as five groups of five carols, set
in thematic order. The first five carols, Carols 1 to 5, form a group centered on basic articles
of faith: Ten Commandments, Seven Deadly Sins, Seven Works of Mercy, Five Wits, and
Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost. All are composed in Audelay’s 7-line carol stanza (the fifth
line is a tag, the sixth and seventh are the burden). All are similar in length: the first four
have five stanzas; the fifth has six. In a pedagogical manner, all address standard topics of
doctrine that priests were enjoined to impart to the laity. These topics are treated elsewhere
in Audelay’s verse, and sometimes the chaplain has drawn from earlier works to construct
carols almost verbatim. For example, portions of True Living (the first poem in the manu-
script) crop up in five different carols.30 Comparative study of the carols with the rest of
Audelay’s oeuvre can therefore tell us much about the chaplain’s compositional methods
and his sense of meter matched to genre.
Carols 6 through 10 constitute another internal group, all written in 6-line stanzas. The
topics of these carols follow the Church calendar of observance for December 25 to 29. First
comes a song of convivial Yuletide joy and welcome, in which Audelay names the saints
honored in the next songs:

Welcum be ye, Steven and Jone, Stephen and John [the Evangelist]
Welcum, childern everechone, children (i.e., Holy Innocents)
Wellcum, Thomas marter, alle on — Thomas martyr, all together
(Day of the Nativity, lines 13–15)

Here Audelay invokes the feast days that immediately follow Christmas Day, which his next
four carols honor: Saint Stephen’s Day, Saint John’s Day, Holy Innocents Day, and Saint
Thomas à Becket of Canterbury’s Day. In The Golden Legend, Jacobus de Voragine explains

28
Greene, Early English Carols. See explanatory notes to Seven Deadly Sins, Day of the Nativity, Day
of the Lord’s Circumcision, Day of Epiphany, Jesus Flower of Jesse’s Tree, and Joys of Mary.
29
There are signs of similar circumstances in the copying of Chastity for Mary’s Love and Gabriel’s
Salutation to the Virgin. See the explanatory notes for each poem.
30
The carols that show signs of construction from stanzas in True Living are: Ten Commandments,
Seven Works of Mercy, Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost, Four Estates, and Chastity of Wives. See the explanatory
notes to these carols.
INTRODUCTION 17

that the martyrdoms of Stephen, John, and the Innocents, all associated with Christ’s birth,
exemplify “all the different classes of martyrs . . . the first is willed and endured, the second
willed but not endured, the third endured without being willed. Saint Stephen is an example
of the first, Saint John of the second, the Holy Innocents of the third.”31 John the Evangelist
was, moreover, the patron saint of Haughmond Abbey, and his statue appears among others
in the columns outside the chapter house. An effigy of Saint Thomas of Canterbury, with mitre
and archbishop’s cross-staff, also stands there. Following the orthodoxy of the English Church,
Audelay cites Thomas’s martyrdom in Marcolf and Solomon (line 342), reminding readers how
the archbishop courageously defended the Church against pressure from secular powers.
The sequential logic of the next five carols, Carols 11 to 15, seems to work by an associ-
ation of ideas about the Christ Child, kingship, the boy king Henry VI, social order, and
childhood innocence. Carol 11 commemorates the feast day of the Lord’s Circumcision,
January 1, honoring the newborn King and carrying forward the chronology found in the
last internal group (Carols 6 to 10). Although Audelay’s version of this lovely carol is the best
of the variant texts, scholars have doubted that Audelay wrote its innovative lyrics, which ap-
pear to mix parts for a soloist and a chorus, allowing a joyous dialogue to develop between
a company and a “messenger.” Nonetheless, a modern musical adaptation of this Christmas
choral work ascribes it to Audelay, and that is how it has been recorded in recent years.32
The carol dedicated to King Henry VI occurs in the twelfth position, and it appears that
Audelay wanted this spot to be understood as the center of the whole carol sequence, for
Scribe B highlights it with a prominent leaf-point drawn in the foliage of the ornamental in-
itial A. Audelay’s loyalty to the monarch has emerged earlier in the manuscript, in the Saluta-
tion to Saint Bridget. The next carol, with borrowings from True Living, expresses Audelay’s
conservative attitude that those of each estate should serve in it properly and not seek to do
other than their own calling. The fourteenth carol, Childhood, covers a topic quite unusual
in lyrics of Audelay’s time, and it is especially interesting to see how Audelay gives the gener-
al theme found in this group of carols a personal turn.33 The grouping ends with a return
to the theme of Christ the Child King and the Christmas season, in a commemoration of the
Visit of the Magi and the feast day of Epiphany, January 6 (Carol 15).
The fourth internal set of five carols, Carols 16 to 20, takes a genealogical turn, encour-
aged by the preceding theme of Christ’s birth, with a steady focus on Marian devotion. Carol
16 celebrates Saint Anne, mother of Mary, and one can see that Audelay wanted it placed
here for thematic reasons, rather than beside the Salutation to Saint Anne that appeared with
the other salutations. Rosemary Woolf praises this carol as “a Marian variation of the Tree
of Jesse,”34 and by introducing this theme, Audelay pairs it explicitly with the next carol, Jesus

31
Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:49–50.
32
The modern choral adaptations may be found in: Stevens, Mediaeval Carols, pp. 8–9 (no. 11)
and p. 20 (no. 27); and Hoddinott (composer), “Carols, op. 38,” in Audelay, “What Tidings?” Other
arrangements appear in the British Library catalogue, but I have not examined them: Oldroyd, “The
Flower of Jesse”; Rutter, “There Is a Flower”; and Lloyd, “The Fairest Flower.” I am aware of the
following three sound recordings: The Elizabethan Singers, Carols of Today; New York Pro Musica
Antiqua, English Medieval Carols and Christmas Music; and Oxford Camerata, Medieval Carols.
33
Salter praises this carol for its “warmth of feeling for the innocence of a child — an emotion
more unusual in [Audelay’s] age than we might think possible” (Fourteenth-Century English Poetry, p. 17).
34
Woolf, English Religious Lyric, p. 297.
18 POEMS AND CAROLS

Flower of Jesse’s Tree. With Saint Anne Mother of Mary using the Tree of Jesse to describe Mary’s
conception, this one brings the image to full bloom: the branch is Mary, the flower Christ.35
The next two carols celebrate the Virgin Mary directly: Carol 18 is about her five joys,
recalling Audelay’s handling of the subject in the Salutation to Jesus for Mary’s Love; Carol 19
salutes her with an “Ave” (that is, “Heyle”) and centers all feminine beauty and floral fecun-
dity in her person, “Heyle, of wymmen flour of alle, / Thou herst us when we to thee calle!”
(burden). The last carol of this grouping declares how the male speaker (a monk or a cleric)
has chosen chastity for the love of Mary.
After these twenty carols, Audelay finishes the carol sequence in an eloquent manner.
Carols 21 and 22 redirect the message about chastity, which was drawn from the holy exam-
ple of Mary, so that it is now aimed at secular women. The first of these carols speaks to sin-
gle maidens, preaching that they have a moral duty to preserve virginity before marriage.
The next focuses on the moral and social mandate that wives be chaste, with Audelay betray-
ing his disgust for ladies who “wil take a page” (line 36) for lust or fashion. The seventh
stanza declares that England is in decline as the result of such wanton behavior (lines 43–47),
which not only disgraces the upper classes, but also creates unlawful heirs and causes English
nobility to waste away. So Audelay continues to develop the genealogical theme, moving it
from the biblical and spiritual realm (the Tree of Jesse) to the current social realm (the
nobility of England). Finally, he addresses chastity’s highest purpose: love of God (Carol 23).
In this austere yet touching carol, the word love suffuses every line, with its different meanings
devotionally intertwined, to create, in the words of John Hirsh, “a gentle reflection . . . upon
what [Audelay] and many of his contemporaries would have regarded as the greatest of
medieval themes, the love which exists between God and all of humankind.”36
After this enraptured moment, and as Audelay nears the end of the carol sequence, the
chaplain turns to a natural closing topic in his Dread of Death, the best-known and most-
praised carol of the collection. Its tone is direct and sincere, personal and moving:

As I lay seke in my langure, sick; languishing

With sorow of hert and teere of ye, tear of eye
This caral I made with gret doloure — sadness
Passio Christi conforta me.
Ladé, helpe! Jhesu, mercé!
Timor mortis conturbat me. (Saint Francis, lines 43–48)

Woolf ranks this poem beside the verse of George Herbert and observes that “for perhaps
the first time in an English lyric poem, the poet truly speaks in his own voice.”37 Audelay
signs this poem, asking his reader to “Lerne this lesson of Blynd Awdlay” (line 61). He also
signs the last carol, which honors Saint Francis. One cannot be certain why it is that Audelay
concludes by honoring this saint, but the purpose seems both religious and literary: Audelay
has praise for friars elsewhere, and credit went to Francis as the originator of popular reli-

35
In the art-edition of this poem created by Loyd Haberly in 1926, the artist develops a visual
theme of Mary and Jesus as the conjoined flower of salvation progressively unfurled in Christian
narrative (Alia Cantalena de Sancta Maria by John Awdlay).
36
Hirsh, Medieval Lyric, p. 193.
37
Woolf, English Religious Lyric, p. 335; see also pp. 7, 387–88.
INTRODUCTION 19

gious song. The full sequence ends with a petition to gentlemen-readers that they be rever-
ent receivers of this carol:

I pray youe, seris, pur charyté, for

Redis this caral reverently,
Fore I mad hit with wepyng eye,
Your broder Jon the Blynd Awdlay. (Saint Francis, lines 73–76)

Viewed in their totality, the carols create a narrative of faith. To judge them in terms
of how Audelay responds to authority, one may note that they are much like the salutations
in how they honor the saints and avow fealty for the monarch. There are liturgical carols
celebrating Stephen, John the Evangelist, the Holy Innocents, and Thomas of Canterbury.
Female saintliness is honored in carols to Saint Anne and the Blessed Virgin Mary, and
chastity is lauded in the name of the virgin saints Katherine, Margaret, and Winifred (Chas-
tity for Mary’s Love, line 19). The series ends in celebration of Saint Francis. Thus Audelay
makes prominent among his aims the naming of saints and the invocation of their benefi-
cence. Before any of these saints were invoked in specific carols, the sixth carol, Day of the
Nativity, seemed to enfold all the company of saints as a prelude to what is to come. With the
burden “Welcum, Yole, in good aray, / In worchip of the holeday!” this carol sings a wel-
come by name to Mary and Christ Child, to Stephen, to John and Thomas, and lastly to the
present company:

Welcum be ye, lord and lady,

Welcum be ye, al this cumpané,
Fore Yolis love, now makis meré —
Welcum, Yole, foreever and ay! (lines 25–28)

After enumerating the doctrines of faith in Carols 1–5, Audelay summons the community
of saints, with himself playing a kind of cosmic host who draws together a grand assemblage
of living and convivial carolers with the saints and martyrs of heaven.

MEDITATIVE CLOSE

The final section of the Audelay manuscript provides texts for private meditation, which
are, again, in meaningful sequence. Its focus is on endings — the end of the book, the end
of one’s life, for the reader and for Audelay. It begins with two short treatises in English
prose, one by Richard Rolle (but not attributed to any author) and another by an anonymous
writer. These two items are prefaced by an instructional pair of couplets from Audelay,
written by Scribe B:

Rede thys offt, butt rede hit sofft,

And whatt thou redust, forgeete hit noght, read
For here the soth thou maght se truth
What fruyte cometh of thy body. (Instructions for Reading 4, lines 1–4) fruit

The verse asks a meditative reader to absorb these items tenderly and often as a way to think
upon the spiritual rewards (“fruyte”) that may follow one’s bodily life. They seem to preface
the prose alone, but it is possible that they refer to the whole closing movement redacted
20 POEMS AND CAROLS

by Scribe A during the first stage of the manuscript’s making. In this movement, which I will
term “Phase 1,” there are two prose texts followed by two poems in alliterative stanzas. The
successive phases for ending the manuscript appear to be three in number.
Phase 1 texts are in the hand of Scribe A, with Scribe B performing his normal oversight
duties of correcting errors and adding incipits and explicits. The first of the prose texts is
an excerpt from Rolle’s Form of Living, the Yorkshire hermit’s last work, written in 1348–49
for the instruction of a young female recluse. Drawn from this popular treatise’s sixth chap-
ter, Audelay’s extract, The Sins of the Heart, catalogues moral transgressions according to a
threefold scheme of bodily origin in the heart, mouth, or hand. Rolle’s exposition offers a
fine preaching text to someone of Audelay’s vocation. Intriguingly, one finds embedded in
Rolle’s prose an alliterative stanza matching the type found in Marcolf and Solomon. This lit-
tle bit of verse, Over-Hippers and Skippers, concerns the abuse of prayer. It would seem that
here is another remnant of Audelay’s professional method of composition. Drawing material
together for effective sermonizing, Audelay borrows a pertinent snippet from Rolle and
interjects a lively verse exemplum. We may thus imagine this item not only as a private med-
itation but also as a likely vestige of pastoral performance. And, again, when matter derived
from elsewhere appears in the Audelay manuscript, it is subsumed and transformed “ac-
cording to” Audelay. The next prose piece, an allegory of the soul, also bears the chaplain’s
creative sensibility in how it works in juxtaposition with The Sins of the Heart. Comparable
in manner to the Abbey of the Holy Ghost, An Honest Bed allegorizes the penitent soul as a bed
made ready for Christ. Set in tandem with the Rolle extract, this fine piece of soul-cleansing
enacts a process of penance and calm readiness for death and union with Christ.
Audelay then shifts from pastoral prose to dignified verse: alliterative stanzas deliver a
solemn prayer and an exemplum on death. These texts are the last ones redacted by Scribe
A. They advance the book to the point of human death, squarely confronted, humbly ac-
knowledged. The prayer-poem Paternoster creates an important moment in which the Lord’s
Prayer is enunciated in English. As Audelay asserts in Marcolf and Solomon, the Paternoster
will protect one’s soul from damnation: “Fore better is a Paternoster with repentyng / To
send hem, to the mercé of God, to purgatoré” (lines 927–28). Its ruminative recitation here,
in stanzas that articulate its seven points, touches the chords of faith. In its “seven-ness,”
moreover, Paternoster seems to summon, cumulatively, all the theological sevens previously
enumerated to Audelay’s reader for penitential contemplation: Seven Words of Christ on the
Cross, Seven Bleedings of Christ, Seven Hours of the Cross, and so on. This poem, a specimen of
alliterative high style, bears formal affinity — and almost certainly a shared exemplar —
with the next item, Three Dead Kings. Although Audelay’s authorship of these two pieces
remains in doubt, he deserves credit for the way they effectively close his book and produce
a sobering devotion. Numerous efforts to correct wordings show that the two scribes found
the language and metrical exactitude of the verses to be challenging and foreign, yet both
poems receive the scribes’ care and, indeed, reverence. Three Dead Kings narrates a classic
ghost-story motif, the Three Living and Three Dead, in a tour de force of dense alliteration
and rhyme. This popular theme of memento mori brings three kings face to face with
unsettling mirrors of themselves in future time, when they meet the Three Dead, that is, the
walking, speaking corpses of their fathers.
INTRODUCTION 21

These works complete Audelay’s plan for the book as first conceived.38 Read as a textual
sequence, The Sins of the Heart, An Honest Bed, Paternoster, and Three Dead Kings capture the
mystery, awe, and dread of death. The last-place positioning of Three Dead Kings invites a
reader to look in the book as if in a mirror that brings dead author and living reader into
a reciprocal relationship.39 The third figure of the Dead issues a warning to the Living that
reaches out to the reader: “Makis your merour be me!” (line 120). The message implicit in
the vernacular icon suits Audelay’s own daily office of singing trentals, that is, the living have
a double responsibility to offer prayers for the dead (to alleviate their purgatorial sentences)
and to continually ponder their own dying. As the first ending of the Audelay manuscript,
the point where Scribe A’s work ends (Phase 1), this ending is austere and magnificent in
its simple, stark appeal.
But the Audelay manuscript does not quite stop here. Judging by the scribal work,
Audelay twice expanded its manner of closure by adding new texts, and for each operation
he relied upon Scribe B (with Scribe A now absent). An interval must have fallen between
Phases 1 and 2 because the verse text inserted after Three Dead Kings — Cur mundus militat sub
vana gloria — was apparently put there after Scribe B had completed his extensive work of
correcting, decorating, and numbering the texts redacted by Scribe A. Phase 2 takes the
book into Latin, as if the language of the Church helps to solemnize and sanctify the process
toward death. Using a formal hand rarely seen elsewhere in the book, Scribe B adds this
commonplace poem on the vanity of life, an aphoristic piece that surfaces often in English
and Continental manuscripts. It dates from at least the thirteenth century and has been as-
cribed to various authors, Bernard of Clairvaux and Robert Grosseteste among them. The
Latin poet declares that one should “put more trust in letters written on ice than in the empty
deceit of the fragile world” (lines 5–6), and in two stanzas of ubi sunt, he uses the passings of
Solomon, Samson, Absalom, Jonathan, Caesar, Dives, Tullius, and Aristotle to illustrate this
sad, transitory life (lines 13–20). Near the end, the poet chastises the flesh and exhorts good
works: “O food for worms, O pile of dust, O dew, O vanity, why are you so extolled? You have
absolutely no idea whether you will be alive tomorrow, [and so] do good to all for as long as
you are able” (lines 29–32). And he offers trust in God as his final advice: “Think on heavenly
things; may your heart be in heaven. Happy is the one who will be able to despise the world”
(lines 39–40). The insertion of this familiar piece proceeds from the same clerical logic by
which several of Audelay’s works conclude with Latin prayers. Cur mundus moralizes poetic-
ally upon the world’s transitoriness in the professional manner of Audelay the chaplain.
The final phase of completing the Audelay manuscript probably occurred not too long
after the addition of the Latin poem, for Audelay, though gravely ill, was still acutely en-
gaged with the bookmaking endeavor, and he still had the services of Scribe B. Phase 3 re-
turns the book to Audelay’s own distinctive voice. The chaplain-poet lays authorial claim
here to its composition and compilation, even as he returns to his typical formula of

38
Even though Audelay seems here to be acting more as a cleric who culls disparate materials
than as a writer of new compositions, these four items are a fully integrated part of his well-ordered
anthology. It is therefore regrettable that Audelay’s Early English Text Society editor, Ella Keats
Whiting, passed over the prose works entirely (Poems of John Audelay). Their omission from the only
prior edition of Audelay’s works purporting to be complete has left Audelay’s crucial closing pattern
entirely obscured from view until now.
39
Fein, “Life and Death, Reader and Page.”
22 POEMS AND CAROLS

modestly ascribing true authorship to God, saying that he “made this bok by Goddus grace”
(Audelay’s Conclusion, line 51). Audelay’s Conclusion is an original poem in 13-line stanzas with
Latin headings, which the ailing chantry priest composed especially for the occasion here.
Its four stanzas are, in their autobiographical manner, much like Audelay’s Epilogue to The
Counsel of Conscience at the end of The Counsel of Conscience.40 In it, Audelay signs off with a
bold flourish of retrospective finality, proclaiming his purpose consummated, in implicit
likeness to God’s act of the creating the world by a word (lines 1–8). He also invokes, by
means of the physical manuscript, the heavenly book recording the names of the saved (line
19). Following these audacious similitudes comes another vigorous assertion of authorship:
the claim that this book displays Audelay’s own “wyl” and “wrytyng” (line 33). As he departs
for the last time, the poet makes a penitential, pious appeal for prayers for “Jon the Blynde
Awdelay” (line 48) and draws a portrait of himself situated in the abbey, serving as chantry
priest for Lord Lestrange, but now lying close to death (lines 45–52). Thus does a fine aes-
thetic sensibility unify the three-phase process of closure. Like the third Dead in Three Dead
Kings, Audelay holds himself up in Audelay’s Conclusion as a mirror of mortality for all readers
who come after him and behold this image.41 And one of his Latin epigrams directly recalls
the last line of Cur mundus: “Hic vir despiciens mundum” (This man despising the world)
(Audelay’s Conclusion, heading to line 27).
The Audelay signature found at the end of this last poem is the only signing to appear
in the meditative close, but it is typical for the book as a whole. Nine signatures occur in The
Counsel of Conscience, and the salutations and carols sections each contain two or three more.
When one absorbs the reading experience offered by MS Douce 302, one quickly comes to
know the identity of its central creative agent, for his name, John the Blind Audelay, is much
recorded, usually in the verse itself though occasionally in a colophon or incipit. Both scribes
partake in this grand goal of naming Audelay. Authorial identity — indeed celebrity — thus
becomes blended with the verse experience, and, in fact, Audelay’s distinctive style — exhor-
tative, preacherly, admonitive, insistently repeating the pronoun “I” — works strenuously
to imprint the author’s convictions on piety and contrition within the mind and heart of a
reader or auditor.

AUDELAY, AUTHORSHIP, AND AUTHORITY

The salutations had culminated in a devotion consisting of prayers, a drawing, and an

address to the Holy Face, in which God is called the mirror of holy men (Salutation to the
Holy Face, line 7). Ultimately, the climactic approach to God’s Holy Face offers a meaning
that supersedes Audelay’s human agency, in a manner analogous to Audelay’s own
declarations of modesty in his signature stanzas. It is God who is the author of all things.
Audelay’s acts of working or making verse look to God and his word for guidance. The core
of this idea surfaces in the last poem, Audelay’s farewell to the reader:

40
The two poems appear to be related compositions, and some of the Latin headings in Audelay’s
Conclusion repeat exact phrases found in the Finito libro colophon; see the translations that open this
Introduction.
41
Fein, “Good Ends,” pp. 101–09.
INTRODUCTION 23

Only in God ys all comforde. comfort

For ther nys noon odur Loorde is no other
That can do as he can.
All thyng he made here with a worde. (Audelay’s Conclusion, lines 4-7)

God — Creator of the world, Font of the word — grounds the devotional spirit of this
signed poem. Set where it is, Audelay’s Conclusion operates like the salutations’ climactic face
of God, that is, as a final mirror in which sinners may view themselves and assess their
contrite readiness before God’s judging countenance. All we may bring to the judgment are
our deeds, our words, our will, and our thoughts, as Audelay counsels in his Dread of Death
(lines 31–33). So Audelay’s final affirmation of his own modest “makyng” — here and in all
the signature stanzas — is enclosed within a context of God’s higher Word. The words
inscribed in MS Douce 302 represent the pious acts that Audelay will offer when he is to be
judged.
How Audelay himself would have perceived authorial authority emerges, therefore,
from the folios of MS Douce 302 in a way apparent only if one looks past the self-namings
and examines other namings in the book. In order to comprehend what rationale exists for
Audelay’s obsessive recording of his own name, one has to understand the joyful reverence
he reserves for uttering other auctoritee — naming the names, that is, of those held to be
most holy and saintly. Therefore, the reasonable modern classification of MS Douce 302 as
an “author collection” has to be qualified by an understanding of just what “authorship,”
“authority,” and even “canonicity” would have meant in around 1426 to the Shropshire
chaplain who obsessively inserts his name into the book. His name is there beside those of
the holy fathers and saints, to whose authority he defers, and it is there in humble, blissful,
awed, and fearsome expectation of facing the holy countenance in judgment, where he will
discover his deeds, words, and thoughts recorded in a roll. Bringing sinners out of pain con-
stitutes the most beneficent deeds of the saints, and this is the role the chaplain carves for
himself, in humble likeness to God, Christ, Mary, and their heavenly followers:

These halowne — al the sayntis in heven, These [ones sing] praise

Angelis, patrearchis, and prophet,
The postilis al, with marters steven, martyrs’ voices
The confessours, with vergyns swete —
..............................
Ther bodé and soule in fere schal met. Where; together; meet
When Jhesu schal schew his wondis wete, wet
Maré, thou be our mayne-paroure, legal surety
With these sayntis to have a sete. (Salutation to Mary, lines 109–12, 116–19)

The attribution of the Audelay manuscript to the poet John the Blind Audelay thus occurs
because Audelay situates himself as a holy man whose role is to mediate between two worlds.
His words apprehend and animate the lively host of saints in heaven, and his book is de-
signed to set these virgins, martyrs, prophets, and apostles in prayerful, redemptive conver-
sation with an audience of those who dwell in sin on earth.
24 POEMS AND CAROLS

NOTE ON THE PRESENTATION OF TEXTS

The texts are printed in the modern alphabet and follow the conventions of the Middle
English Texts Series. I list here a few details of presentation that require special notice.

Transcription. Final l or final k with a medial horizontal line is rendered as le or ke.

Following the practice of past editors (and especially Halliwell and Whiting), the
abbreviation p with a horizontal line through the descender is rendered variably as per or
par in Middle English, and as per in Latin. Other editors’ variant readings of these forms are
listed in the textual notes. When scribal þe denotes the pronoun, it is rendered thee.

Abbreviations. Roman numerals appearing in texts (not as title numbers) are normally
treated like other abbreviations and are silently expanded to the scribes’ usual Middle
English forms; for example, scribal v. is rendered as fyve.

Foliation. Material from the manuscript is cited by folio number, recto or verso (“r” or
“v”), and column (“a” or “b”).

Titles. The titles of works in MS Douce 302 usually derive from the Latin incipits. Works
assigned a roman numeral by Scribe B have titles rendered in all capital letters.

Ordinatio. Signs of authorial and/or scribal arrangement of matter are reproduced so far
as is practical. Roman numerals attached to titles replicate those inserted by Scribe B in red
and blue ink at the tops of columns, where they denote the beginning of texts. Underlining
replicates the original underlining of textual lines in red ink. Where Scribe B provides
marginal indicators, they are reproduced in this edition by the insertion of a typographical
hand sign. In the manuscript these indicators take different visual forms: a hand with
extended forefinger (twice), a horn, and pointing leaf foliage.

Stanza forms. Stanzas are presented in forms that respect scribal indicators of stanza
length and rhyme schemes. Different interpretations of stanza lengths and line breaks in
previous editions are discussed in the explanatory notes.

Carols and burdens. In the manuscript each carol opens with its burden (i.e., refrain),
followed by the verses. The burden was sung after each verse, and the scribes assume an
audience that knows the pattern. In just three of the carols (Carols 11, 13, 18), one of the
scribes writes “ut supra” to indicate a portion of the repetitions. In this edition the carols are
printed in their full sung form: opening burden and then its repetition after each verse
stanza. The carols are copied in the manuscript by Scribe A (burden and verses) with Scribe
B supplying the titles.

Cross-references to the Whiting edition. Numbers prefixed with “W” refer to Ella Keats
Whiting’s editorial system of numbers assigned to the verse contents of MS Douce 302.
Other previous editors are cited in the explanatory and textual notes.
 THE COUNSEL OF CONSCIENCE

[X.] TRUE LIVING [W1]

............................
In hel ne purgatoré non other plase, nor; nor any other place
Thes synnes wold make you schamyd and schent, ashamed; disgraced
And lese your worchyp in erth and grace. lose your honor on earth
Al day, with ene, sene thou has eyes, you have seen
5 Hou men bene slayne fore dedlé synne
And han vengans fore here trespace; receive retribution; their
Both lyve and goodes thay lesyn then, life; lose
Bi londys law. law of the land
Yif thai had kept Cristis comaundment,
10 Thai schuld never be schamyd ne chent, disgraced
Ne lost here lyfe ne lond ne rent, income
Nouther hongud ne draw. Nor be hanged nor drawn (executed)

Hel is not ordent fore ryghtwyse mon, ordained; righteous man

Bot fore hom that here serven the Fynd; them; Devil
15 No more ys a preson of lyme and ston prison; limestone
Bot to hom that the lauys thai done offend, Only for them; laws
Fore wyckyd dedys makys thevys ischent, thieves disgraced
Hye on galouys fore to heng. gallows
Ther rightwyse men thai han god end, These; have a good end
20 Fore thay bene treue in here levyng —
Trust wel therto!
He that levys here ryghtwysly, lives here righteously
On what deth that ever he dy,
His soul never schal ponyschyd be, punished
25 Ne never wyt of wo. experience woe

The syn of sodom, into heven sodomy

Hit crys ever on God Almyght! cries
And monslaght, with a rewful steven manslaughter; rueful voice
Hit askys vengans day and nyght!
30 Extorcyons agayns the ryght,
And huyrus that with wrong holdon be: payments
Damnacion to ham hit is ydyght them; ordained

25
26 THE COUNSEL OF CONSCIENCE

That usyn these, and avowteré — adultery

Everychon!
35 These synnys a mon thai done blynde, These sins do blind a man
Fore thai be don agayns kynde, against nature
And bene the werkys of the Fynde
Of damnacion.

Thre synns princypaly a man doth mare — ruin

40 Murthyr, theuft, and avoutré — Murder; theft; adultery
Thai wyl you schend ore ye be ware! disgrace you before you know [it]
Be thai done never so prevely, privately
The Fynd wyl schew ham hopunly, them openly
That al the word schal have wyttyng, world; knowledge
45 Fore thai bene cursyd in heven on hye.
Ale that usus that cursid doyng, use; doing
Thai wyl be schent.
Fore morther, Cayme cursud of God was he, Cain [Genesis 4:11]
And fore theft, thevys al day hongud thay be;
50 Fore avoutré, vengans had Kyng Davé adultery; David received punishment
Fore brekyng of the sacrement.

Avowtré ne lechory, men set not by men fear not

To breke the bond of the sacrement;
Thay schul aby ful sekyrly, be punished most certainly
55 Bot thai have spase ham to repent. Unless; space themselves
Herefore, ye curatis, ye wyl be schent, curates; disgraced
And prestis that bene lewyd in here levyng, unchaste
Fore to this syn ye done asent
With evyl ensampyl to other yeveng! giving
60 And wretyn hit ys:
Ye were choson to chastyté,
To kepe your holy order and your degré profession
In parfyt love and charité,
And mend ale other that done amys. correct

65 Kepe youre wedloke, ye weddid men!

In paradyse God furst hit mad
Betwene Adam and Eve, with trew love then, [Genesis 2:21–24]
Both mon and womon therwith to glad;
Therwith he is both plesud and payd satisfied
70 Yif hit be kept laufully.
Hymselfe was borne of a mayde [God] himself
To fulfyl that sacrement princypaly;
Into herth he come earth
To make ther eyrus of heven blys; their (Adam and Eve’s) heirs [gain]
75 That Lucefyr lost and al hys, What Lucifer and all his [company] lost
[X.] TRUE LIVING 27

Monkynd schal hit agayne encrese replenish

Or the Day of Dome. Before

Nou yif a woman maryd schal be, married

Anoon sche schal be boght and sold; Soon
80 Hit is fore no love of hert, treuly,
Bot fore covetyse of lond or gold.
This is Goddis wyle, and his lau wolde: This [instead]; law’s command
Evan of blood, evan good, evan of age, Equal
Fore love togeder thus cum thai schalde, For thus shall they come together for love
85 Fore thes makus metely maryage these [equal conditions] suitably make
Here in al wyse. in every way
Thai schal have ayres ham betwene, heirs
That schal have grace to thryve and thene; prosper
Ther other schul have turment and tene These others; trouble
90 Fore covetyse.

Ther is no cryatour, as wreton Y fynde, creature

Save only mon that doth outrage; perverts nature
Thai chesun here makus of here houne kynd, [Animals] choose their mates; own
With treu love makun here mareage. make
95 Nou a ladé wyl take a page
Fore no love bot fore fleschely lust,
And al here blood dysparage; disparage by marrying low
Thes lordys and lordchips, thay ben ilost
In moné a place! many
100 Lordys and lorchypus, thay wastyn away,
That makys false ayris, hit is no nay, [By those] who; heirs
And wele and worchyp, foreever and ay, weal
Onour and grace. Honor

Now yif that a man he wed a wyfe

105 And hym thynke sche plese hym noght,
Anon ther rysis care and stryfe; arises
He wold here selle that he had boght,
And schenchypus here that he hath soght, embarrasses
And takys to hym a lotoby. paramour
110 These bargeyn wyle be dere aboght This bargain; dearly bought
Here ore henns he schal aby! or later he will pay
He is foresworne: has broken his oath
When he as chosyn hyr to his make, has; mate
And plyght here trowth to here ytake, plighted his troth to marry her
115 Hy schulde never here foresake,
Even ne morne. Evening or morn

Agayns ale this, remedy I fynde:

Foresake youre syn, Y you pray!
28 THE COUNSEL OF CONSCIENCE

To God and mon loke ye be kynde

120 (To heven ther is nother way), no other
And make amendis wyle that ye may! while
Yif ye wyl have remyssyon,
God ye most both plese and pay please and satisfy
(Or ellus have damnacion) else
125 Wyle ye han space.
Thus graciously says the Kyng of Blys,
“Yeff ye wyl mend that ye do mysse, If; amend; amiss
Nolo mortem peccatoris,1
Ye schul have grace.”

130 In what order or what degré religious order or estate

Holé Cherche hath bound thee to,
Kepe hit wel, I counsel thee; Uphold
Dyssyre thou never to go therfro,
Fore thou art boundon, go were thou goo. wherever you go
135 When thou hast ressayvd the sacrement, received
Ther is no mon may hit undoo,
Bot he be cursid, verament. Unless he be damned, truly
In the Gospel thou sist see
That God be law byndus yfyre, That what God by law binds together
140 Ther is no mon that hath pouere power
Hit to undo in no manere,
Bot he be curst.

Love your God over al thyng, above

Youre neghbore as yourselfe, as I you saye. [Matthew 19:19]
145 Let be youre othis, youre false sweryng. Forsake; oaths
In clannes kepe youre haleday. sinlessness; holy day
Youre fader, youre moder, worchip ay. always
Sle no mon fore wordlé thyng. Slay; worldly
Bakbyte no mon, nyght ne day, Gossip about
150 Ne say no word to hym sklaunderyng; slanderous
False wytnes, loke thou non bere. Look that you do not bear false witness
Dysseyte ne theft, loke thou do non, Deceit
And lechory, thou most foreswere;
Here beth the comaundmentis, everychon — every one [Exodus 20:1–17]
155 Loke ye kepe hem wele!

1
I desire not the death of a sinner. Compare Ezechiel 33:11 (dicit Dominus Deus nolo mortem impii sed
ut revertatur impius a via sua, et vivat, “saith the Lord God, I desire not the death of the wicked, but that
the wicked turn from his way, and live”), Ezechiel 18:32 (quia nolo mortem morientis dicit Dominus Deus
revertimini et vivite, “For I desire not the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord God, return ye and
live”), and Ezechiel 18:23. This Latin line serves as the refrain in God’s Address to Sinful Men. Compare
also Marcolf and Solomon, lines 790–92; Our Lord’s Epistle on Sunday, line 115 (see explanatory note to
lines 114–17); and The Vision of Saint Paul, explicit.
[X.] TRUE LIVING 29

I rede ye serven Heven Kyng, counsel

Fore ané loust or lykyng, any desire or pleasure
Have mynd apon youre endyng, Be mindful of
Of the payns of helle.

160 Another remedé yet ther is —

Gentyl seres, herkens to me! —
The Seven Werkys of Mercé, so have I blys,
I wyl declare ham oponlé. openly
Thai schul be schewed ful petuysly shown; pitiably
165 At Domysday, at Cristis cumyng,
Ther God and mon present schal be,
And al the world on fuyre brennyng, fire burning
A reuful aray! pitiful
Then wele is hym, and wele schal be,
170 That doth these werkys with peté; compassion
He schal have grace and mercé
On Domysday.

The hungré, gif mete; the thorsté, gif dryng. food; thirsty; drink
Cleth the nakyd, as I thee say. Clothe
175 Vysyte the seke in preson lying, Visit; sick
And beré the ded, as I thee pray. bury
And herbere the pore that goth be the way, shelter
And teche the unwyse of thi cunnyng.1 ignorant; knowledge
Do these werkys both nyght and day
180 To Goddis worchip and his plesyng —
This is his wylle! —
Ever have this in thi mynd:
To the pore, loke thou be kynd,
Then in heven thou schalt hit fynd
185 Thou schalt never spyle. be destroyed

Thi Fyve Wyttis thou most know —

Thonke thi God that land ham thee! — lent them
Thi heryng, thi seyng (as I thee schewe call
Thi syght), thi smellyng, here be thre;
190 Thi touchyng, thi tastyng, here fyve ther be,
To reule thee withyn thi levyng. rule; existence
God hath thee graundid ham graciously, granted
Hym to love over al thyng. [So that you might] love him
His wyl hit is.
195 Yif thi fyve wittis here bynn welle spend, are; spent

1
The seven works of mercy; compare Matthew 25:31–46. Audelay treats the subject elsewhere:
God’s Address to Sinful Men, lines 164–71, and Seven Works of Mercy.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 641253 341526 254613
614523 314256 245163 145236 124365
Here are eighteenscore changes wanting one, which one if it
were made double as the former, would bring the bells round,
therefore an extream must be made as in this change 123465, the
two hind bells making the extream, and the bells in the 3d and 4th
places making the single. Now in regard that this extream is made
the second time the whole-hunt leads after a double bob, therefore
the second extream must be made the second time the whole-hunt
leads after the third double bob following.
This peal may be rung with any hunts, and to begin the changes
triple and double as in this here prickt.
 Fifty three London-Peals
upon Five, Six, Seven, and Eight
Bells, composed by F.S.
 Crambo.
The changes are all single; it hath a perfect course, and may be prickt
many ways.
12345 45312 23514 35142 13254 41325
21345 54312 32514 35124 13245 14325
21435 54132 32154 53124 31245 14352
24135 45132 23154 51324 31425 14532
24153 45123 23145 51342 13425 41532
42153 54123 32145 15342 13452 41523
42135 54213 32415 15432 31452 14523
42315 52413 23415 51432 34152 14253
24315 52431 23451 51423 34125 41253
24351 25431 32451 15423 43125 41235
42351 25413 32541 15243 43215 14235
42531 25143 35241 51243 34215 12435
24531 52143 35214 51234 34251 21453
24513 52134 53214 15234 43251 12453
42513 25134 53241 15324 43521 21543
45213 25314 53421 13524 34521 12543
45231 52314 35421 13542 34512 12534
54231 52341 35412 31542 43512 21534
54321 25341 53412 31524 43152 21354
45321 23541 53142 31254 41352 12354
12345
 The Primrose. 1 and 2.
The treble hath a perfect course as in plain changes. And when it
hunts up out of the 2d place it makes two singles together, and the
like when it hunteth down. When it leads, the single is in the 3d and
4th places, except when 2 lies next it, and then an extream behind.
Every bell (except the treble) leads four times, and lies still behind
untill the treble displaceth it, except at the extream.
12345 51432 15234
21435 15342
24135 15432 12543
24315 Extre.
23451 14523 12534
32541 14253
35214 15243
35124 12435 15423
31524 Extre.
13254 12453 14532
13524 14352
31254 14235
32154 14325 13425
32514 13245
35241 13452
53421 13542 12354
54312 Extre.
54132 15324 12345
 Orpheus.

12345 14253 34125 54312 32541 52134

13254 41523 43152 53421 23514 51243
13245 41532 43125 53412 23541 51234
31254 45123 34215 35421 25314 15243
31245 45132 34251 35412 25341 15234
32154 54123 32415 53142 52314 12543
32145 54132 32451 53124 52341 12534
23154 51423 23415 51342 25431 21543
23145 51432 23451 51324 25413 21534
21354 15423 24315 15342 24531 12354
21345 15432 24351 15324 24513 12345
12435 14523 42315 13542 42531
12453 14532 42351 13524 42513
21435 41352 43215 31542 45231
21453 41325 43251 31524 45213
24135 14352 34521 35142 54231
24153 14325 34512 35124 54213
42135 13452 43521 53214 52431
42153 13425 43512 53241 52413
41235 31452 45321 35214 25143
41253 31425 45312 35241 25134
14235 34152 54321 32514 52143
One change is double, the next single, and so by turns.
 New Doubles and Singles. 1 and 2.
One change is double, the next single, and so by turns. The
treble hath a direct hunting course up and down as in plain changes,
and every time it goeth to lead and leaves leading, the change is
double on the two first and two last bells, the rest of the double
changes are on the four first. The treble is one of the two bells that
makes every single change except when it leads, and then the single
is made in the 3d and 4th places; but when the 2 lies next the 1, then
an extream is made behind. When the treble leaves the two first
bells, they continue slow dogding until treble comes down and
displaceth them. Every bell (except the treble) lieth twice in the 3d
place.
12345 51324 15234
21354 15342
23154 15432 12543
32514 Extre.
32541 14523 12534
23451 14253
23415 15243
32145 12435 15423
31245 Extre.
13254 12453 14532
13524 14352
31542 14235
35142 14325 13425
53412 13245
53421 13452
35241 13542 12354
35214 Extre.
53124 15324 12345
 The Morning Star. 1 and 2.
The treble hath a direct hunting course as in plain changes; and
every time it hunts up, it makes two singles together, and the like
when it hunts down: when it leads the single is behind, but when 2
lies next it an extream is made in the 3d and 4th places. Every time
the treble goeth to lead and leaves leading, the double is on the two
first and two last bells, and every bell except the treble leads four
times together.
12345 51432 14523 15243
21354 54132 14532 14253
23154 54312 13425 14235
23514 53421 12354 13452
25341 35241 extre. 15324
52431 32514 12534 12543 15342
54213 32154 extre.
54123 31254 14352 12453 12435
51423 13245 14325 extre.
15432 13254 13542 12345
15423 15234 13524
 The Quirister. 1 and 2.
This peal consists most of double changes; the treble hath a
direct hunting course as in plain changes, and every time it hunts up
and down it makes a single in the 3d and 4th places; and when it
leads, the single is behind, but when 2 lies next it an extream is made
in the 3d and 4th places.
12345 32514 15234
21354 35241 15243
23145 53421
23415 54312 14352
24351 54132 14325
42531 51423
45213 15432 12543
45123 15423 extre.
41532 51432 12453
14523 54123
14532 54213 15324
41523 52431 15342
45132 25341
45312 23514 14253
43521 23154 14235
34251 21345
32415 12354 13542
32145 extre. 13524
31254 12534
13245 12435
13254 13425 extre.
31245 13452 12345
32154
When the treble leaves the two hind bells, they continue dodging
untill it comes up again and displaceth them, and then they hunt
directly down; the first to lead, and the other into the 2d place: that
which moves to lead, having lead four times, gives place to the treble;
but when the Treble hath done leading it takes the treble’s place
again, and leads four times more and then hunts directly up; the
other bell which moved down into the 2d place lies there twice, and
then the Treble in hunting down moves it into the 3d place where it
lies still, untill the Treble in hunting up moves it back into the 2d
place, where having lain twice it hunteth up. This Peal is as musical,
easie, and practical as any of this kind that ever was prickt.
 The Faulcon. 1 and 2.
This Peal consists most of double changes. The treble hath a
direct hunting course as in plain changes, and every time it hunts up
and down it makes a single in the 3d and 4th places, and when it
leads a single is also made there, but when 2 lies next it the extream
is made behind. When the treble leaves the two first bells they
continue there until it comes down again and displaceth them, but
observe, when the treble moves into the 5th place, and again from
thence, the double is on the two first and two last bells, by means of
which the two first bells then dodg, but before and after they lie still.
Every bell lies twice in the 3d place and then hunts up, except that
which lies there when the treble leaves leading.
12345 53241 15243
21354 35421 14235 15423
23145 53412 14325
23415 53142 14532
32451 51324 13452 14352
23541 15342 13542
32514 15432 13425
32154 15324 13245
31245 14523 15234
13254 14253 12354
13524 12543 extre.
31542 12435 extre. 12345
35124 extre. 12534
35214 12453
 Merry Andrew.
1 and 2.
One change is double, the next single, and so by turns. The
treble leads four times, lies behind four times, and twice in every
other place. Every other bell leads four times. When the treble leaves
the two hind-bells, they continue dodging untill it comes up again
and displaceth them. Every single is made behind until the treble
hinders, and then in the 2d and 3d places. When the treble leads and
the 2d lies next it, then an extream is made in the 3d and 4th places.
When the treble goes to lead and leaves leading, the double is on
the two first and two last bells, and when every other bell goes to lead
and leaves leading, the double in on the four first.
12345 51423 23514 15243
21354 15432 32154 15234
21345 15423 32145 12543
23154 14532 31254 extre.
23145 14523 31245 12453
32415 41532 13254
34215 41523 13245 13542
32451 45132 12354 13524
34251 45123 extre. 15342
43521 54213 12534 15324
45321 52413
43512 54231 14352 14235
45312 52431 14325 14253
54132 25341 13452 12435
54123 23541 13425 extre.
51432 25314 12345
 May-day. 1 and 5.
One change is double, the next single, and so by turns. When the
treble goes to lead and leaves leading, the double is on the two first
and two last bells; and when every other bell goes to lead and leaves
leading, the double is on the four first.
The treble hath a constant dodging course, for in its hunting up
it first makes a dodg in the second and third places, and then another
behind, and then it lies still one change in the 5th place; then in its
hunting down it makes another dodg behind, and also another in the
2d and 3d places, and then leads four times. So that the treble in one
of the two bells that makes every single until it leads, and then ’tis
made in the 2d and 3d places, except when the 5th lies behind, and
then an extream is made in the 3d and 4th places. When the treble
leaves the two hind-bells they continue slow dodging, until it comes
up again and displaceth them. Every bell leads four times.
12345 45132 12543
21354 41523 15234
23154 45123 12534
21345 54213
23145 54231 14352
32415 52413 13452
32451 52431 14325
34215 25341 Extre.
34251 25314 14235
43521 23541
43512 23514 15324
45321 32154 13524
45312 31254 15342
54132 32145 13542
51432 31245
54123 13254 12453
51423 12354 14253
15432 13245 12435
14532 Extre. Extre.
15423 13425 12345
14523
41532 15243
 St. Dunstan’s Doubles. 1 and 2.
The changes are all double except one single every 2d time the
treble leads, there being six in the peal. The treble is a perfect hunt;
and every time it goeth to lead and leaves leading, the double is made
on the two first and two last bells, at which changes the bells in the
3d place lie still and then move down, and the two hind-bells at the
same time dodg: but at other times all the bells have a direct hunting
course. When the treble leads, and the 2d lieth either in the 2d or 3d
places, then a single must always be made betwixt the two next
extream bells to the 2d.
12345 13245 12453
21354
23145 15423 13542
32415 14532 15324
34251
43521 12354 14235
45312 extre. single.
54132 12534 14253
51423
15432 14352 13524
14523 13425 15342
41532
45123 15243 12435
54213 single. Extre.
52431 15234 12345
25341
23514 14325
32154 13452
31245
13254 12543
single. extre.
 Church Doubles. 1 and 2.
The changes are all double except six singles as the former. The
treble is a perfect hunt; and every time it moves up into the 5th place,
and also out of it, the double is then made on the two first and two
last bells, at which time the bells in the 3d place do lie still and then
move up; and the two first bells at the same time dodg. When the
treble leads, and the 2d lieth either in the 2d or 3d places, then a
single must always be made betwixt the two next extream bells to the
2d.
12345 13254 14325
21435 single.
24153 13245 12543
42513 Extre.
24531 14532 12453
42351 15423
24315 15324
42135 12354 13542
41253 Extre.
14523 12534 14235
15432 single.
51342 13425 14253
53124 14352
35214 15342
53241 15243 13524
35421 single.
53412 15234 12435
35142 Extre.
31524 13452 12345
In this and the former peal the singles may be made in another
manner, viz. when the whole-hunt leads, and the half-hunt lieth
either in the 4th or 5th places, a single must then be made betwixt
the two next bells to the half-hunt; but at other times a double
change to be made when the whole-hunt leads, as in the former way.
 Stedman’s Principle.
The changes are all double, two singles excepted. One double is
made on the two first and two last bells, the next on the four last, and
so by turns successively; excepting every sixth change, which is
double on the four first bells, and for distinction is called a Parting
change. All the bells have a like course. The general method is this;
the three first bells go the six changes, and the two hind-bells in the
mean time dodg; then a Parting change is made which parts the two
hind-bells, moving that in the fourth place down into the 3d, and
that in the 3d place up into the 4th, and then the three first bells go
the six again, the two hind-bells in in the mean time dodging as
before; and then another Parting change is made, and so
successively on. Every bell that comes behind continues there
dodging six changes with one bell and six with another, and then in
course the Parting change brings it down. One six cuts compass, the
next doth not, and so by turns successively. In the six which cut
compass the two first bells of the three makes the first change of it,
but in the other the two last of the three. By this method the peal will
go sixty changes, and to carry it on farther extreams must be made.
An extream is made by the lying still of two bells when in course they
should make a change, as before I have shewed more fully in the
Introduction, page 90. but withall observing, that whereas in this
peal the bells have all a like course, therefore they may all be termed
extream bells, and consequently the extreams to be made according
to this general rule, viz. the first extream may be made by any two
bells that are in course to make a change within the compass of the
first sixty changes of the peal; and the second extream must be made
according to this rule. Whatsoever two bells are dodging behind at
the first extream, when the same two bells come to dodg there again,
is a certain warning for the second extream to be then made. And
observe, how many changes the first extream is made from a parting
change; so many likewise must the last extream be made after a
Parting change also. And the single and extream comes in course
each of them to be made in the same place and by the same bells at
the last extream, as they were at the first. Here the singles are made
behind, and the extreams in the 2d and 3d places; and as the 4th and
5th bells do dodg behind at the first extream, so likewise when they
come to dodg there again, the second extream is then made, the
treble leading at both of them, as appeareth in the peal here prickt.
12345 42135 52431 24513 51324
21354 41253 25341 42153 15342
23145 14523 52314 24135 13524
32415 41532 53241 21453 31542
23451 45123 35214 12435 35124
24315 54132 32541 14253 53142
42351 51423 23514 41235 35412
43215 15432 32154 14325 34521
34251 51342 31245 13452 43512
43521 53124 13254 31425 45321
45312 35142 extre. 34152 54312
54321 31524 13245 43125 53421
53412 13542 31254 41352 35241
35421 15324 32145 14532 53214
34512 51234 23415 41523 52341
43152 15243 32451 45132 25314
34125 12534 34215 54123 23541
31452 21543 43251 51432 32514
13425 25134 42315 15423 23154
14352 52143 24351 51243 21345
41325 25413 42531 52134 12354
14235 24531 45213 25143 extre.
12453 42513 54231 21534 12345
21435 45231 52413 12543
24153 54213 25431 15234
The first Parting change is here made the third change at the
beginning, and that six cuts compass.
In all the several ways of ringing this peal, if the Parting changes
are made at the fore-stroke, as in course they are in this here prickt,
then cutting compass is always on the same sixes, as in this peal: but
when the Parting changes are made at back-stroke, then the contrary
six always cuts compass to what doth here.
 Peals upon Six Bells.

The single Method.

The changes are all single, and treble is the hunt. When the treble
moves up out of the 2d place, the two first bells continue slow
dodging untill the treble comes there again. And when the treble
moves down out of the fourth place, the two hind-bells likewise
continue slow dodging until the treble comes there again. When the
treble leads, (if ’tis rung at half-pulls) the fore-stroke change (that is,
at the third stroke of the treble’s leading) is made in the 3d and 4th
places, the rest of the changes there are made behind. By this method
it will go sixscore changes.
 123456 135264 164253
213456 164235
213465 153642
231465 153624 146352
231456 146325
321456 135624
324156 135642 164325
234156 164352
234516 153426
324516 153462 146523
324561 146532
234561 135462
235461 135426 164532
325461 164523
325416 153264
235416 153246 146235
235146 152346 146253
325146 152364 142653
321546 142635
312546 125643
312564 125634 124356
132564 126534 124365
132546 126543 123465
135246 123456
162435
162453
To ring 240. When the whole-hunt leads, and the half-hunt
dodgeth behind; the fore-stroke change must then be made in the 2d
and 3d places, as in this here prickt, where the 2d is the half-hunt
and there are little marks set at the fore-stroke changes.
To ring 360. When the whole-hunt leads, and the half and
quarter-hunts dodg behind, the fore-stroke change must then be
made in the 2d and 3d places as before.
To ring 720. When the whole-hunt leads, and the half-hunt
dodgeth behind, the fore-stroke change must then be made in the 2d