Hunting Carol, A (At A Place Where I Me Set)

DESCRIPTION: "As I walked by a forest side," a forester tells the singer to bide. They wait for a hart. The singer looses his hounds and sounds his horn, declaring, "We shall have sport and game enough: With hey! go bet! Hey! go bet! how!"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1521 (printed by Wynkyn de Worde)
KEYWORDS: hunting animal MiddleEnglish
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (10 citations):
Greene-TheEarlyEnglishCarols, #424, pp. 287-288, "(no title)" (2 texts)
Sidgwick/Chambers-EarlyEnglishLyrics CXLIV, p. 245, "(no title)" (1 text)
Rickert-AncientEnglishChristmasCarols, p. 139, "A Carol of Hunting" (1 text)
Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, #418
DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #695
ADDITIONAL: Roman Dyboski, _Songs, Carols, and Other Miscellaneous Poems from the Balliol Ms. 354, Richard Hill's Commonplace Book_, Kegan Paul, 1907 (there are now multiple print-on-demand reprints), #87, pp. 103-104, "[How! we shall have game & sport ynow!" (1 text, with a second text on p. 186)
Celia and Kenneth Sisam, _The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse_, Oxford University Press, 1970; corrected edition 1973, #249, p. 526, "Stag-Hunt" (1 text)
Thomas G. Duncan, editor, _Late Medieval English Lyrics and Carols 1400-1530_, Penguin Books, 2000, #146, p. 177, "At a place wher he me sett" (1 text)
MANUSCRIPT: {MSRichardHill}, The Richard Hill Manuscript, Oxford, Balliol College MS. 354, folio 176
MANUSCRIPT: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson 4to 598, recto (this is actually a print by Wynkyn de Worde, from 1521, but it's from the manuscript era and cataloged with them)
NOTES [205 words]: This exists in only two copies, but both are fairly significant. One is the famous Richard Hill manuscript; the other is a scrap of a carol book by Wynkyn de Worde, dated to 1521, which also contains the Boar's Head Carol. These two are clearly the same song but also substantially different (e.g. the Hill text has a "Tro-ro-ro" call in the verse which de Worde lacks); although they are very nearly contemporary, the evidence of folk processing is strong. I've indexed the piece on that basis.
The chorus "Go bet!" seems to inspire some disagreement in commentators. The Sisams gloss "bet" as "quick," Rickert-AncientEnglishChristmasCarols calls it a hunting cry and says "bet" might mean "better" or "beat"; Greene explains it explicitly as "better." Greene compares it to line 1213 of Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women"; that line (in the Legend of Dido) reads "WIth 'Hay! Go bet! Pryke thow, Lat gon! Lat gon!'" The Riverside Chaucer glosses "Go bet" as "hurry up," which is certainly the point of the rest of the line. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women, translated and with an introduction by Ann McMillan, Rice University Press, 1987, p. 102, translates "go faster!"
"Go bet" also occurs in the carol "Sir Peny." - RBW
Last updated in version 6.8
File: MSAHuCar

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