No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
XXI.—The Earl of Warwick's Virelai
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The career of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, from 1401 to 1439 is hardly to be equalled in the annals of chivalry, even by that earlier Richard, Cœur-de-Lion It is no part of this introductory note to his Virelai, to rehearse in detail the extraordinary events of his long life of travel, adventure, warfare, and diplomacy. Mr. James Gairdner's life of the hero tells the story of his chief exploits, and those to whom Dugdale's Warwickshire is accessible may read it in detail. But to come upon a literary personality in the fifteenth century is so rare a thing, and the character of Richard Beauchamp is so happy an example of a true knight of the Middle Ages, that these few notes upon him and his family, most of them not in Gairdner's article, will not come amiss to the student of the period.
Information
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1907
References
page 597 note 1 In the Dictionary of National Biography, vol. iv, article Richard Beauchamp.
page 597 note 2 Edition of 1730, vol. i, 405–411.
page 598 note 1 These events are told in Dugdale, loc. cit., who used as his source the episodic accounts explaining the famous drawings of the life of this Earl, in ms. British Museum Cotton Julius E IV, pt. ii. For a full account of the drawings (reproduced by Strutt in Manners and Customs, vol. ii), see Sir E. M. Thompson in the Burlington Magazine, vol. i (1903), pp. 151–164. He gives much of the text, with four drawings.
page 599 note 1 Printed in Gairdner's Paston Letters, article I.
page 599 note 2 Thompson's date. Others are given.
page 599 note 3 So Shirley in Harley 7333 and the Harvard Shirley ms.
page 599 note 4 So Shirley in Harley 7333, printed in Wright, Political Songs (Rolls Series), ii, 131–140. Lydgate tells us this in his poem, also.
page 599 note 5 So Shirley in the same ms.
page 599 note 6 So the rubric in Cotton ms. Titus A xxvi, a good xv century text. It calls Isabelle, “now Countasse.” This is the poem referred to by Mr. Sidney Lee (Dictionary of National Biography, article Lydgate, vol. xxxiv, 307), as the “XV Odes,” an odd mistake for the “Fifteen Ooes,” so called because each stanza begins with O. The title of “Fifteen Ooes” belongs properly, however, to the Ooes of Christ, an entirely different poem by Lydgate. Mr. Lee is further in error in assigning Stowe as his authority for the rubric here noted. Stowe had nothing to do with the Titus ms.
page 599 note 7 Mentioned above.
page 600 note 1 From ms. Lansdowne 285 (British Museum) ff. 16–17.
page 601 note 1 Oue for o. Dugdale, l. c., p. 406, reads from Cotton ms. “the green knight with a black quarter.”
page 601 note 2 The Warwick bear is well known, of course.
page 604 note 1 Copied from ms. Cotton Julius E IV, fol. 25b. This episode is not quoted by Sir E. M. Thompson, loc. cit.
page 604 note 2 Brit. Mus. Adds. 24194.
page 604 note 3 See her remarks on Shirley in Modern Philology, i, 330 ff., Anglia xxviii, 1 ff., xxx, 320–348. O. Gaertner's recent dissertation, Johan Shirley's Leben und Werke (Berlin, 1906), is useless for this purpose.