Fowles in the Frith

DESCRIPTION: "Foweles in þe frith þe fisses in te flod, And I mon ware wod Mulch sorwe I walke with for beste of bon and blod." "Fowl in the forest, The fish in the flood, And I must wax mad (or "on tree"?). Much sorrow I walk with For the best of bone and blood"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: Late XIII (Bodleian Library MS. Douce 139)
KEYWORDS: religious nonballad bird animal MiddleEnglish
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (12 citations):
Stevick-OneHundredMiddleEnglishLyrics 17, "(Foweles in the frith)" (1 text)
Sidgwick/Chambers-EarlyEnglishLyrics III, p. 5 (no title) (1 text)
Hirsh-MedievalLyric-MiddleEnglishLyricsBalladsCarols #21, "(Foweles in the frith) (1 text, with a much-reduced photograph of the manuscript on page 78)
Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, #864
DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #1442
ADDITIONAL: Bruce Dickins & R. M. Wilson, editors, _Early Middle English Texts_, 1951; revised edition 1952, #XXVI, p. 119, "Sorrow" (1 text)
R. T. Davies, editor, _Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology_, 1963, #4, p. 52, "I Live in Great Sorrow" (1 text)
Maxwell S. Luria & Richard Hoffman, _Middle English Lyrics_, a Norton Critical Edition, Norton, 1974, p. 7, #6 (no title) (1 text); p. 8 has a photograph of the music and a modernized transcription
Celia and Kenneth Sisam, _The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse_, Oxford University Press, 1970; corrected edition 1973, #266, p. 549, "(no title)"
Carleton Brown, editor, _English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century_, Oxford University Press, 1932, p. 14, "I Walk With Sorrow" (1 text)
Arthur K. Moore, _The Secular Lyric in Middle English_, University of Kentucky Press, 1951, p. 29, "(Fowles in the frith)" (1 text)
MANUSCRIPT: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce MS 139 (Bodleian 21713), folio 5 (with music)
NOTES [225 words]: The only surviving copy of this has music, so it is certainly a song, but there is no evidence that it is a folk song. Indeed, D. W. Robertson declared that "the melody is not popular in character" (although he was a literature expert, not a music expert).
On the other hand, it has provoked so much scholarly discussion of it that it perhaps belongs here.
For starters, is it a secular or a religious song? If it is secular, then "wud" in line three presumably means simply "madness," and "the best" in the last line is the singer's best-beloved. But if it is religious (a perspective most strongly advocated by Edmund Reiss, according to David C. Fowler, The Bible in Middle English Literature, University of Washington Press, 1984, p. 83), then "wud" means "wood," i.e. the cross of Jesus, and "the best" is Jesus, the best of all humans. Another possibility is that "beste" does not mean "best" but "beast," which probably should be read as something like "creature." (Thus certainly including creatures but possibly humans as well.) I see no way to resolve any of these questions.
The manuscript of this was assembled from several shorter manuscripts, all of about the same period. Most authorities date the manuscripts to the late thirteenth century; some go so far as to specify c. 1270 as the date for the portion containing this piece. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.8
File: MSFowFri

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