Erthe upon Erthe (Earth upon Earth, Earth out of Earth)

DESCRIPTION: "Earth out of earth is worldlly/wondrously wrought, Earth has gotten on earth a dignity from nought...." Earth out of earth would be a king: Alexander, Hector, Arthur are examples. But at the end it returns to earth, leaving only a foul stench
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: before 1537 (Richard Hill MS., Balliol Coll. Oxf. 354); several scholars date the earliest form c. 1325
KEYWORDS: warning death MiddleEnglish
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (32 citations):
Stevick-OneHundredMiddleEnglishLyrics 26, "(Erthe took of erthe, erthe wyth wogh)" (1 fragment) [A version]
Sidgwick/Chambers-EarlyEnglishLyrics XCIV, p. 171, "(no title)" (1 text)
Ritson-AncientSongsBalladsFromHenrySecondToTheRevolution, p. 13, "(no title)" (1 fragment, filed under the Death of Simon de Montfort) [A version]
Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, #704 [B version], #705 [C version], #6292 [A version]
DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #1170 [B version], #1171 [C version], #3939 [A version], #6369 [more B versions]
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), #80b, pp. 90-92 "[Earth Upon Earth]" (1 text) [B version]
Hilda M. R. Murray, _The Middle English Poem Erthe upon Erthe, printed from 24 manuscripts_, Early English Text Society, 1911 (22 manuscript versions plus French and Latin and some cemetery texts on pp. xxxvi-xxxviii, including both "A" texts, the one "C" text, and 19 "B" texts, plus a photograph of the Harleian 2253 text; the DIMEV seems to distribute the versions in a way that differs from Murray)
Frederick J. Furnival, _Hymns to the Virgin and Christ, The Parliament of Devils, and other Religious Poems, chiefly from The Archbishop of Canterbury's Lambeth MS. #853_, Early English Text Society, Tuebner & Co., 1867, pp 88-90, "Earth" (1 text) [B version]
R. T. Davies, editor, _Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology_, 1963, #87, p. 180, "Earth out of earth" (1 text) [B version]
Carleton Brown, editor, _English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century_, Oxford University Press, 1932, #73, p. 132, "From Earth to Earth" (1 fragment) [A version]
Maxwell S. Luria & Richard Hoffman, _Middle English Lyrics_, a Norton Critical Edition, Norton, 1974 p. 230, #242 (no title) (1 fragment) [A version]
Celia and Kenneth Sisam, _The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse_, Oxford University Press, 1970; corrected edition 1973, #284, p. 554, "(no title)" (1 fragment) [A version]
G. L. Brook, _The Harley Lyrics: The Middle English Lyrics of MS Harley 2253_, Manchester University Press, 1948, 1956 (I use the 1964 third edition with updated bibliography), #1, p. 29, "(no title)" (1 fragment) [A version]
Thorlac Turville-Petre, _Poems from BL MS Harley 913: 'The Kildare Manuscript'_, Early English Text Society/Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 76-83, "Earth" (1 text) [A version]
MANUSCRIPT: London, British Library, MS. Harley 2253, folio 59 [A version; although it's only four lines long, the Harley MS. is famous and is the source of most of the printed A texts]
MANUSCRIPT: London, British Library, MS. Harley 913, folio 62 [A version, in a fuller form]
MANUSCRIPT: {MSRichardHill}, The Richard Hill Manuscript, Oxford, Balliol College MS. 354, p. 434 [B version]
MANUSCRIPT: {MSLincolnThornton}, Lincoln, Lincoln Cathedral Library MS. 91 [Robert Thornton MS. 1; Lincoln Thornton MS.], folio 279 [B version]
MANUSCRIPT: {MSPorkington10}, Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS. Porkington 10, folio 79 [B version]
MANUSCRIPT: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. 220 (Bodleian 2103), folio 106 [B version]
MANUSCRIPT: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Rawlinson C.307 (Bodleian 12164), folio 2 [B version]
MANUSCRIPT: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Selden Supra 53 (Bodleian 3441), folio 159 [B version, in a manuscript that consists mostly of texts from Thomas Hoccleve]
MANUSCRIPT: Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS. 237, folio 240 [B version, in another manuscript with a lot of Hoccleve and several items on death]
MANUSCRIPT: Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS. Pepys 2553, p. 338 (the Maitland Folio Manuscript, of Scottish poets such as Henryson and Dunbar, especially the latter; parent of the Reidpeth manuscript below) [B version]
MANUSCRIPT: Cambridge, University Library, MS. Ll.5.10, folio 43 [the Reidpeth manuscript , 1623; a copy of the Maitland Folio Manuscript above) [B version]
MANUSCRIPT: Cambridge, Trinity College, MS. R.3.21 [Trinity 601), foilo 33 [B version, in a text mostly of religious verse and Lydgate]
MANUSCRIPT: London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus A.XXVI, folio 153 [B version]
MANUSCRIPT: London, British Library, MS. Harley 984, folio 72 [B version, fragment]
MANUSCRIPT: London, British Library, MS. Egerton 1995, folio 55 [B version]
MANUSCRIPT: Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, Codex 721 [B version]
MANUSCRIPT: Cambridge, University Library, MS Ii.4.9, folio 67 [C version]
MANUSCRIPT: London, British Museum, MS. Royal 17 A.XVI, folio 30 [C version]
NOTES [1312 words]: I have no absolute proof that this song was sung, let along sung traditionally; Boklund-Lagopolou, p. 43, believes it was not. But it was extraordinarily popular in the Middle Ages; there are at least twenty manuscript copies of the so-called "B" version, and there are also "A" and "C" versions. And some of these manuscripts are important, notably the Richard Hill manuscript, Balliol College 354, but also the Lincoln Thornton Manuscript, Porkington 10, and Harley 913 (for the latter, see the notes to "The Entrenchment of Ross"); most of the others are less significant (at least for folk song and romance scholars). But they include at least one commonplace book other than Hill's (British Library Egerton 1995, which Murray, p. xii, called "William Gregory's Commonplace Book"), and Murray, p. xxxv, says that copies are often added on flyleaves at the beginning and end of the books, which implies that private individuals knew and cared for the poem enough to copy it into an already-written volume/
As additional evidence of oral tradition, there are substantial variations between these versions. And, unlike a lot of medieval poetry, the earliest version is in a form that would at least permit singing -- four-line stanzas, typically with all four lines rhyming; my guess is that the lines are supposed to have four dactylic feet, although there is a lot of variation. (Wells, p. 387, suggests instead that the base form is "four irregular five-stress verses[=lines] on one rime," but while the syllable count is possible, the stresses don't fit).
Furthermore, although there are Latin and French versions, it seems certain that the English is the original, because the concept (playing with the meanings of earth=ground and earth=the human body) only makes sense in English; Latin and French don't have this equivalence (Murray, p. ix). There is an established genre of "Soul and Body" poems, to which Murray thinks this belongs, but most do not use this sort of wordplay.
So while I can't prove the song has been in oral tradition, I think it at least deserves to be in the Index.
Brown considers his four line fragment, known as the "A" type, to be the original. It is not, however, the common version. Murray, who did the most detailed analysis, also considered the "A" version to be the oldest, although she considers the whole version, not just the four-line text, to be the original (Murray, p, ix-x). The four-line form, probably the earliest copy of them all, is from manuscript Harley 2253 (the famous "Harley Lyrics" manuscript), which is usually dated to the early fourteenth century (several authorities follow Böddeker in placing it c. 1310, since it mentions the execution of Sir Simon Fraser in 1306 and the death of Edward I in 1307, but Brook, p. 3, notes also a seeming mention of Bannockburn, which took place in 1314. Brook therefore argues for 1314-1325; I would simply say that it's from before 1350). Murray, p. xiv, suggests that this short form may have been intended as a riddle -- but on p. xxxvi suggests that it was intended for an epitaph, given that it it was based "on the very words of the burial service"; short forms in fact occur on several extant tombstones, one of them for a man who died as late as 1761.
The rhyme scheme of the longer "A" version, in Harley 913, is six-line stanzas rhymed aaaabb, so the four-line version looks like it was used as the first four lines of a longer stanza. The other manuscript of the "A" version, Harley 913, is discussed under "The Entrenchment of Ross."
Based on the table on p. xvii of Murray, although the large majority of the "B" versions start with the same four verses ("Earth our of earth is wondrously wrought," "Earth upon earth yet would be a king, "Earth wins upon earth both castles and towers," "Earth builds upon earth as mold(e) upon mold(e)," there are at least a dozen other verses that show up in the various texts in various combinations.
Wells, p. 387, says that manuscripts of the piece range "from the early fourteenth to the seventeenth century. On tombstones and in mural inscriptions portions of it have been employed almost up to the present time." (The DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse gives references for several of these inscriptions. Murray's main text has the two "A" versions, eighteen manuscript versions of the "B" text in the main body and two more in a late appendix (or, in one case, a version copied onto a wall), one version of "C"; the tombstone versions are listed separately. Murray also prints a Latin and a French text, almost certainly translated from the English, on pp. 41-46.
Wells also says "the texts of the two later versions are in metre quite different from the earliest version, and range in length between 20 and 82 verses[=lines, i.e. 5 to 16+ verses]. The second version [i.e. "B"] is in 18 MSS ranging from 1400 to 1623.... The third version ["C"], in MS. [Cambridge University Library] Ii IV 9 f[olio] 67 t (15th century), has 82 lines, combining parts of both the other versions." This is based on Murray's classification on pp. ix-x.
The "earth out of earth" tag is, I think, a reference to Genesis 3:19, "you are dust, and to dust you shall return," although obviously that doesn't use the word "earth." And while the two words might be confused in some languages, the Latin Vulgate -- which was *the* Bible of Western Christendom at the time -- uses the word "pulvis" in Genesis 3, and "pulvis" definitely means "dust," not "earth." (The Greek, however, uses "earth" -- γη, ge -- rather than "dust"; perhaps the song was written with reference to some Greek author who wrote about Genesis 3:19). Woolf, p. 84, also attributes the poem to Genesis, but via the Missal, "Memento homo quod cinis es et in cinterem revertis" (an idea probably derived from Murray, p. ix), which in the Sarum Missal becomes "Remember man that you are dust and to dust you shall return," although Latin "cinis" is primarily "ashes," not "dust." Woolf considers the form to be a deliberate pun -- adding that, in the Middle Ages, puns were not a form of humor but of linguistic synthesis.
Turville-Petre, p. 87, confirms the link to Genesis 3:19 but believes the immediate source was the liturgy for Ash Wednesday.
The list of names offered in some of the long versions as examples of those who have gone to dust are interesting. The Hill manuscript, for instance, lists the Nine Worthies: Josue (Joshua), Dauyd (David), Judas Machabe (Maccabaeus), Alisander (Alexander the Great), Ector (Hector of Troy), Julius Cesar, Arthyr, king Charlis (Charlemaigne), Godfrey of Bolown (Godfrey of Boullion, leader of the First Crusade). The list then adds William the Conqueror and King Harry the First "þat was of knyghthode flowr" (Henry I, the third son of William the Conqueror, whose two greatest accomplishments were to set aside his older brother Robert Curthose and to have about three dozen illegitimate children; he also perhaps arranged the assassination of his middle brother William II). "Seynt Powlis" I assume is Saint Paul.
In the Lincoln Thornton Manuscript (one of the versions with the "foul stench" ending, which is not universal), it appears that it was at one time Robert Thornton's intention to end the manuscript with this piece; it is not the last piece in the volume as bound, but it is the last save one in its particular quire, and the quires after it are a medical book and an herbal (Fein/Johnston, pp. 47-48) that seem to have been written before the rest of the book (Fein/Johnston, pp. 241-246). So it appears that Thornton closed his book with "Erthe," then decided to add the books of practical medicine after he had concluded the book, and so tacked on the short item which occurs after "Erthe" (which is just a two line herbal remedy for sciatica) at the bottom of the page to transition into the medical material. - RBW
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