Secular Lyrics In The Charity Shop
Occasionally I find a book in a local charity shop that lies outside my usual interests but demands to be taken home. A few weeks ago I bought — for £2 — Secular Lyrics of the XIV and XV Centuries. As you do. I bought it for reasons other than the title, although that was quite exotic enough. But this was a slim hardback from Oxford — and at the Clarendon Press, no less. The blue cloth and the cream paper and the title and logo embossed in gold of these books always seemed to guarantee quality.
When I was in sixth form and we had things to look up and read in history or English, it was to such volumes we were usually directed as sources of irrefutable wisdom. As I had no knowledge whatsoever of secular lyrics of any century you care to mention, this felt like a good place to start.
I took my new book to a Costa and sat browsing while I sipped a black coffee. The poems in the book are written with the original spelling but I found that this is not tricky — and there was a glossary at the back to cover any words or spellings that looked completely alien.
I soon found a poem that I thought excellent. It was called To His Mistress, Fairest of Fair and it included these four lines in its penultimate stanza:
“I haue pryntyd yow yn my harte soo depe —
wold to god I were able your seruant to be,
Euery nyght yn your armes ƥat I myght slepe;
rewarde me with your loue: I aske non oder fee.”
I don’t think the English is too hard here but I read it to mean:
I have printed you in my heart so deep —
Would to god I were able your servant to be,
Every night in your arms that I might sleep;
Reward me with your love: I ask no other fee.
The final ‘fee’ means payment, of course. And servant, I believe, can carry or hide a sexual pun — there is a term ‘seruiture’ that often means lover.
But I share those lines because I find them both moving and remarkably modern. Modern not so much in language, perhaps, but definitely in sensibility. And the fact that I find the conveyed feeling modern simply underlines the timelessness of love poetry: we really haven’t moved on since the 14th or 15th centuries. And our anonymous poet here was probably reading ancient lyrics that spoke to him with similar weight. Although this may sound a bit like a standard love poem, it is actually about unrequited love: his erstwhile lover is now with another man (“ye haue refusyd me for a new”).
Oh, and the vocabulary hidden in this slim volume screams out to be reintroduced. One example: worte-wale, which means, apparently, root of a cock’s spur. I don’t remember the last time I had to reference a cock’s spur in general, never mind getting so specific that I needed to make clear it was the root of that spur I wanted to point out but next time…. Next time, I tell you, I will be calling it a worte-wale.
This volume is a first edition and it was published before I was born. Its first owner — and I make the assumption that it was originally owned by the man who stuck his own bookplate into the inside cover, was Cuthbert Rudyard Halsall — a name that sounds closer to the centuries from which these lyrics came than our own time.
I looked up dear Cuthbert. He appears to have been born in Southport in December 1899 and died in Devon in 1975. He married well and was obviously from a fairly wealthy family himself. I found an item for sale at Bonhams and the crest engraved on the candelabra at the auction is the same as on the bookplate claiming the book as belonging to Cuthbert. So one and the same source. Interesting. I wonder, then, by what journey the book came from Cuthbert’s library — possibly dispersed at his death — to the Red Cross charity shop in Redhill in Surrey.
This is another book that I think I’ll hang onto despite my current purge of the shelves.
