Patient Grissell

DESCRIPTION: "A noble marquess, As he did ride a hunting," meets Grissell. The story follows that in Chaucer and the Italien ancestors: He marries her or gets her pregnant, abuses her, casts her aside, and finally reunites with her when she stays faithful
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1877 (Bell); broadside believed to be from before 1590
KEYWORDS: love courting abuse rejection reunion
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Hales/Furnival-BishopPercysFolioManuscript, volume III, pp. 421-430, "Patient Grissell" (1 text)
Bell-Combined-EarlyBallads-CustomsBalladsSongsPeasantryEngland, pp. 73-81, "Patient Grissell" (1 text)
MANUSCRIPT: {MSPercyFolio}, The Percy Folio, London, British Library MS. Additional 27879, page 495
ST BeCo073 (Partial)
NOTES [384 words]: Even though this is found in the Percy Folio, there is no evidence whatsoever that this is traditional, although the tale of Griselda certainly is. Marquis Walter and Griselda are the subject of the "Clerk's Tale" in the Canterbury Tales.
Rollins, p. 215, #2486, is "The sonnge of pacyente Gressell vnto hyr make," registered by Owen Rogers in 1655/1656. I don't know that that is this song, but it seems likely, particularly since it is very nearly contemporary with the Percy Folio.
Although the story has had its admirers (I was astounded to learn that there are more manuscript copies of The Clerk's Tale than any of the other Canterbury Tales), most moderns regard it as monstrous. For a discussion of this, see James Sledd, "The Clerk's Tale: The Monsters and The Critics." This was originally published in Modern Philology LI (1953), and is now available in Wagenknecht, pp. 226-239. The two preceding essays in Wagenknecht, George Lyman Kittredge's "Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage" and Henry Barrett Hinkley's "The Debate on Marriage in The Canterbury Tales," are also worth seeing in this context.
The story originated with Boccaccio; Chaucer seems to have known it from Petrarch's Latin and from a French translation (Bryan/Dempster, pp. 288-290). He changed the details, though, moving the tale to Lombardy and making Walter much more vicious -- "more obstinately wilful, more heartlessly cruel," while cranking up our sympathy for Griselda, according to Bryan/Dempster, p. 290. Turner, p. 320, notes that Chaucer in the 1370s had visited the Italian lands of the Viscontis of Milan (in Lombardy) and had seen firsthand their tendency to create a complete tyranny. Her implication seems to be that Chaucer made his changes in the Clerk's Tale to show the dangers of absolute monarchy. (Dangers, we might add, which threatened England herself in the time of Richard II.)
This leads to an interesting speculation. The Percy Folio was finished some time between 1643 and 1660, which means that the latest pieces in it would have probably been from the 1630s and 1640s -- the time when Charles I was trying to be an absolutist king of England and Scotland. Might the author of this song have been trying to give the same message about absolutism as Chaucer two and a half centuries earlier? - RBW
Bibliography

Bryan/Dempster: W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster, editors, Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, 1941 (I use the 1958 Humanities Press edition)
Rollins: Hyder E. Rollins, An Analytical Index to the Ballad-Entries (1557-1709) In the Register of the Company of Stationers of London, 1924 (I use the 1967 Tradition Press reprint with a new Foreword by Leslie Shepard)
Turner: Marion Turner: Chaucer: A European Life Princeton University Press, 2019
Wagenknecht: Edward Wagenknecht, Editor, Chaucer: Modern Essays in Criticism, Galaxy, 1959 (I use the sixth printing of 1963)

Last updated in version 6.7
File: BeCo073

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