Entrenchment of Ross, The

DESCRIPTION: French. Sir Maurice and Sir Walter feud. New Ross council decides to build a wall. Each day, beginning Candlemas, a different group of merchants, priests,... work on the ditch. Sunday ladies lay up stones for the wall. The defence plans are described.
AUTHOR: sometimes attributed to Frir Michael Kyldare (1308) (translated by Mrs George Maclean, 1831) (source: Croker-PopularSongsOfIreland) -- but see NOTES
EARLIEST DATE: 1829 (_Archaeologia_ vol xxii, according to Croker-PopularSongsOfIreland)
KEYWORDS: foreignlanguage feud music
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
1265 - the town of New Ross, Ireland, fortifies itself for protection from the various armed factions in Ireland
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (5 citations):
Croker-PopularSongsOfIreland, pp. 262-287, "The Entrenchment of Ross" (French and English texts plus extensive notes)
ADDITIONAL: Thorlac Turville-Petre, _Poems from BL MS Harley 913: 'The Kildare Manuscript'_, Early English Text Society/Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 76-83, "The Walling of New Ross" (1 French text with notes and apparatus of variants)
Thomas Kinsella, _The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse_ (Oxford, 1989), pp. 102-106, "The Fortification of New Ross" (1 text, excerpted from Croker)
MANUSCRIPT: London, British Library, MS. Harley 913, folios 64, 61, 55, 56 (disordered)
MANUSCRIPT: London, British Library, MS. Lansdowne 418 (transcript of Harley 913 made by Sir James Ware in 1608, no independent value)
ALTERNATE TITLES:
The Walling of New Ross
NOTES [2108 words]: Croker-PopularSongsOfIreland: "The [Anglo-Norman] ballad on the entrenchment of New Ross, in 1265 ... is here given as a specimen of ancient local song.... " Madden writes about an Harleian MS [913, Art 43] in the British Museum containing a "collection of pieces in verse and prose, apparently the production of an Irish ecclesiastic, ...."
Croker-PopularSongsOfIreland: "It appears evident from [the ballad] that the inhabitants [of New Ross] feared that, in the war between two powerful barons, they should be exposed to insult and reprisal from the Irish who were engaged in the quarrel.... The corporate towns ... walled themselves, in order to be able to preserve their neutrality in the wars of the district which surrounded them.... The whole tenor of this very remarkable song shows that it was written when the fosse [ditch] was nearly finished, but before the walls were begun.... It is ... to be presumed that the fosse was not quite completed when the song now given was composed by some merry minstrel of the place on the day noted at the conclusion, and it was perhaps sung at the corporation dinner after their work." - BS
Although the event is Irish, it really sounds to me as if the song was influenced by the story of Nehemiah's rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem in the book of Nehemiah (especially chapter three). Although the Book of Nehemiah doesn't spend nearly as much time on descriptions of those who worked.
Croker is right that the walling of the city came about in self-defense, though; according to Turville-Petre, p. xxx, in the 1260s, the rulers of England, Henry III and his son the future Edward I, not having the troops to truly control Ireland, promoted factional fighting among the barons to keep any single leader from becoming strong enough to oppose them. It may be that the rebellion in England, which pitted Simon de Montfort against Henry, was reflected in the Irish conflict between the FitzGeralds and Walter de Burgh, the new Earl of Ulster (Turville-Petre, pp. xxx-xxxi). In any case, the Geraldine and Ulster factions began fighting in 1264. New Ross fortified itself in response.
Line 13 of the poem explicitly names those who caused the trouble, "Sire Morice" and "Sire Wauter," that is, Maurice Fitzgerald and Walter de Burgh (so Turville-Petre, p. 130). De Burgh, who had received his earldom in 1264, attacked the FitzGerald castles in Connacht in that same year, producing the situation that led the town of Ross to entrench.
New Ross remained a crossroads and fortified market town as late as the time of the 1798 rebellion. I gather some of the fortifications still stood, though they were in pretty bad shape by then; according to Pakenham p. 195, portions of the wall had been demolished by Cromwell, and the gates widened to improve commerce.
The manuscript which contains this is fairly important. Croker's catalog number cited by Ben is no longer relevant; it is now British Library MS. Harley 913. It has been digitized and scans are available on the British Library site. It is sometimes known as the "Kildare Manuscript" -- a rather misleading name, since its first known location was Waterford, and it may well have originated there. The name "Kildare Manuscript" arises because one of the pieces in it attributes itself to "Frere Michel Kyldare" (Turville-Petre, p. xiii).
It is obviously on this basis that Croker (following Madden, from whom Croker derived the work) attributed this piece to "Michael Kildare." But Kyldare claimed only the "Song of Michael Kildare," which (according to Turville-Petre, p. xlv) is much more competent than most pieces in the book -- and is in "tail-rhyme stanzas of ten lines, rhyming aaa4b3a4b3a4b3a4b3, in which the seventh and ninth lines of every stanza have internal rhyme.... At the end of his poem Michael claims his authorship with justified pride." Woolf, p. 378, thinks that "most" of the poems in Harley 913 are from Friar Michael, but that is not grounds for attributing any particular piece to him. Thus there is no basis for the attribution of this piece to Kildare, and no similarity in format either. And Kildare's "Song" is in English, not French. Croker is almost certainly wrong about the authorship.)
(Incidentally, the description of the "Song of Michael Kildare" as being in tail-rhyme is deceptive, since a normal tail-rhyme stanza is twelve lines, not ten, and there is a short tail rhyme stanza of six; a better description would be "modified tail-rhyme" or some such.)
My own assessment in looking at the photos of the manuscript is that the amount of red ink and pen work, and the handful of uses of blue, implies that the manuscript was probably intended for a fairly significant library or owner, although not one of extraordinary wealth. Much of the red ink has now flaked away (this is not unusual; red inks did not bind as well to parchment as the best black and brown inks, which had more acid), but the black has stood up well.
It is a small book, just 140 x 95 millimeters (Turville-Petre, p. xiii). The writing area varies from page to page, as does the number of lines per page and the color of the ink. All of these hint that the book was compiled over time, not all at once. Turville-Petre is certain it is of Irish origin (based mostly on the several pieces about Irish history, of which this is one), and that it was produced by the Franciscans; this is evidenced not only by the large amount of Latin but by references to Franciscan sites and practices (Turville-Petre, p. xix).
The variable number of pages in the quires implies that the pages have been rearranged and some lost (Turville-Petre, p. xvi). We don't know how much was lost, but the other manuscript cited in the References, British Library Lansdowne 418, contains 11 pieces copied from the Kildare manuscript. Five of these no longer exist in Kildare. This implies that the losses have been heavy (Turville-Petre, p. xviii). Fortunately the "Entrenchment" is one of the pieces in Lansdowne, and Turville-Petre used it to check his transcription; on p. 93 he notes that the Lansdowne copy is in two different hands.
Kildare is a trilingual manuscript, with texts that are in Latin (about half the contents), Middle English (17 items), and Anglo-Norman French (3 items, including this piece). Most of the Latin items are found elsewhere, but only a handful of the ones in the vernacular are (Turville-Petre, p. xix) -- the most important of the latter being in the Index as "Erthe upon Erthe (Earth upon Earth, Earth out of Earth)."
Turville-Petre, p. xx, seems to say that most of the 17 Middle English pieces -- the ones not attested elsewhere -- are in a dialect that differs from the five that were imported from England. Turville-Petre, p. xxviii, identifies the dialect as coming from the southwest or southwest Midlands of England rather than from Ireland -- which to me implies that these pieces were at least worked over by a single author or scribe who was from England, not Ireland. Several other of the Harley poems are like this one in that they describe the unstable Irish political situation of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries (Turville-Petre, p.xxxii); Turville-Petrie, p. xxxv, suggests that they are mostly pro-Fitzgerald. He adds on p. xli that it is the only substantial collection of English verse from Ireland in this period, making it an important reference for what Anglo-Irish literature was like at the time. (Though the largest category of items in the book, as one would expect from a monastery production, are religious, and often tedious -- one, indeed, so tedious that the scribe gave up in mid-line and never came back! -- Turville-Petre, p. xlii. Many of these items are probably preaching notes (so Woolf, p. 373); one is in fact labelled a "Sarmon"=sermon.) The meters vary quite a bit, although "Entrenchment" uses the fairly-standard four-stress couplets (Turville-Petrie, p. xlv).
Wells, p. 228, says that the manuscript was copied no later than 1325 (based, I suspect, on references to King Edward II still being on the throne), but Turville-Petre, p. xxi, believes the book includes references to events up to the year 1334, so it must be more recent than that. There is no consensus about the exact date, but we probably wouldn't be far wrong to say that it was started around 1340 and continued over several years or even decades.
Five scribes have been identified, plus various annotators, but one scribe, who wrote in a textura hand, did most of the work. This scribe, referred to as "A," produced pages that are "very variable in size and aspect" (Turville-Petre, pp. xiii-xiv). This is the scribe responsible for this poem.
There are occasional attractive pages, but on the whole, it's a grubby, cramped-looking little book.
Despite their relative obscurity, and the unattractive presentation, some of the pieces in Harley 913 are considered to be high quality -- particularly the first English item, "The Land of Cokayne"; Furnivall (the co-editor of the Percy Folio) said it was "The airiest and cleverest piece of satire in the whole range of Early English, if not of English, poetry"; Morton showed that it contained several folkloric elements and a relatively universal perspective, where there is abundance without serfdom (Robbins, p. 317).
As the references list says, there are two manuscripts of this, Harley 913 and Lansdowne 418. However, Lansdowne 418 is a transcript of Harley 913 made by Sir James Ware in 1608. It thus has no independent value, although it is useful in that it contains several poems which have been lost from Harley 913, plus it is still legible at a few points where Harley is not -- Turville-Petre adopts its reading in this poem at four places where Harley cannot be read. It appears the damage is primarily to folio 61 of Harley, which looks as if it has been stained by some sort of liquid (I would consider even some of the places where Turville-Petre says he read it to be dubious; the staining is quite severe). I would guess that this happened after the manuscript was disarranged, since there is no staining of the other folios of the poem, although a few letters have been lost at the start of folio 55 due to damage to the parchment.
Turning to the poem itself, Turville-Petre, p. 77, says that the text has been heavily disarranged with the shuffling of the pages of Harley 913 -- the poem as reconstructed being from folios 64, 61, 55, 56, in that order. Thus not only is it out of order, there is other material in the middle of it! "The account is written in rough octosyllabic couplets with rhymes that are sometimes only approximate." The title, in red ink, is so faded that I could not read all of it in the photographs, but Turville-Petre reas it as "Rithmus facture vile de Rosse." As is common in poetry texts of the time, the rhyme words in the couplets are linked by red curved lines, but whoever wrote them seems to have gotten very sloppy very quickly. There are also paraph marks (⊄), presumably to show sections; these seem quite irregular.
The first line is the same as those in another French piece, "The Outlaw's Song of Trailbaston" (Turville-Petre, p. xlvii), which discusses how one can be outlawed without intent to commit a crime, and discusses the difficult life of an outlaw. "Trailbaston" is often cited in connection with the Robin Hood legend.
Line 211 -- not quite the last line, but almost -- ends "amen pur charité." This is a faint link to the text of "Cockayne"; it is also a link to many Middle English texts, e.g. "The Seven Virgins (The Leaves of Life)," which often ends with something like "Amen, good Lord, your charity Is the ending of my song." No one seems to have suggested that line 211 of "Ross" was intended as an ending, but I wonder....
The actual final line, or more correctly the subscription, is the date: "Ce fu fet l'an de l'incarnacion Nostre Seignur M.CC.LXV" -- i.e. the Year of Our Savior 1265.
I have not seen them, but the following articles are apparently fairly important for those who really want to know about this poem:
Angela M. and Peter J. Lucas, "Reconstructing a Disarranged Manuscript: The Case of MS Harley 913, A Medieval Hiberno-English Miscellany," Scriptorium, #14 (1990)
Hugh Shields, "The Walling of New Ross,: A Thirteenth Century Poem in French," Long Room, #12-13 (1975-1976)
Keith V. Sinclair, "On the Text of the Anglo-Norman Poem The Walling of New Ross," Romanische Forschungen, #106 (1994)
Keith V. Sinclair, "The Walling of New Ross: An Anglo-Norman Satirical Dit," Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, #105 (1995)
- RBW
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