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Concerning Huchown
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The Cambridge History of English Literature is the latest augmenter of the confusion that surrounds the mysterious mediæval poet, Huchown of the Awle Ryale. If this volume did not bid fair to become a work of authority for some years to come, there would be perhaps no need of a study concerning Huchown. Unfortunately, however, misstatements are already being made, based upon its authority, and there is therefore a real need of giving the whole matter a thorough overhauling. It is difficult to realize upon what slight grounds the confident assumptions have been made, which credit Huchown with writing so vast an amount of Middle English alliterative verse.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1910
References
page 508 note 1 Allan Ramsay, Christ's Kirk on the Green, canto ii, stanza 3.
page 508 note 2 Scottish Text Society, 1904–05, vol. iv, pp. 18–27. Two parallel texts are there given; my quotation is from the second. Words in brackets are supplied from other mss.
page 509 note 1 This word is variously spelled Epistili, epystyll, and pistill.
page 511 note 1 At least six extensive passages are taken by Andrew from the Brut, viz. ll. 3288–6005, 6177–6278, 9552–9893, 11194–11673, 12910–15378, 24731–24850. I quote these figures from Professor Skeat, who gives extracts from each passage in Pt. iv of his edition of The Bruce (Early Eng. Text Soc., 1889, pp. xxxvi–xli). It is worth while observing that a misinterpretation of some lines in Andrew has succeeded in fastening upon John Barbour a mythical Brut, which the good archdeacon had merely cited as authority. The lines are:
“Off Hiber thai come halyly
Tha we oys to call Yrschery, etc. …
Bot, be the Brwte, yit Barbare sayis,
Off Yrschry all othir-wayis,
That Gurgwnt-Badruk quhille was Kyng,
And Bretayne had in governyng.“ ii, 767.
Here ‘be,’ ‘by,’ means “according to,” as in the expression ‘by the book.’ This line is absolutely the only authority for the oft-repeated statement (found on p. 103 of the Cambridge History) that Barbour was the author of a Brut. Wherever Andrew refers to the Brut, Laзamon's Brut will answer perfectly well as the one intended. But it is more likely he was thinking of some one of the prose redactions.
page 512 note 1 Vol. i, p. 102.
“Clerk of Tranent eik he hes tane
That maid the anteris of Gawane.“
(Works, ed. Small, i, p. 50.)
page 513 note 1 English edition, vol. iii, p. 50.
page 524 note 1 E. g. wrechyd: world: vertous 5; voyde: vayne: wyrchip 10: voyde: vice: wyndowes 909.
page 528 note 1 Ed. F. J. Furnivall, E. E. Text Society, 1864. Cf ll. 203 ff.