Pilgrim's Sea-Voyage and Sea-Sickness, The (Pilgrim's Song; Pilgrims to St. James)

DESCRIPTION: "Men may leve all gamys, That saylen to seynt James," because the sea voyage brings trouble. The work of the sailors is described. The passengers are unable to eat -- and the food is bad anyway. And the smell of the pump is awful
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: before 1600 (MS. Cambridge, Trinity College R.3.19)
KEYWORDS: travel hardtimes MiddleEnglish sea
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (7 citations):
Stone-SeaSongsAndBallads I, pp.1-4, "Earliest Sea Song" (1 text)
Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, #2148
DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #3466
ADDITIONAL: Frederick J. Furnival, _The Stacions of Rome, Pilgims Sea-Voyage, and Clene Maydenhod_, Early English Text Society, Trüner & Co., 1867, pp. 36-40, "The Pilgrim's Sea-Voyage and Sea-Sickness" (1 text)
Celia and Kenneth Sisam, _The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse_, Oxford University Press, 1970; corrected edition 1973, #236, pp. 500-503, "Pilgrims to St. James" (1 text)
Douglas Gray, _The Oxford Book of Late Medieval Verse and Prose_, Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 25-26, "By Sea to Santiago" (1 text)
MANUSCRIPT: Cambridge, Trinity College, MS. R.3.19 (Trinity 599), folio 208
NOTES [793 words]: There is no reason to think this traditional, but Stone-SeaSongsAndBallads calls it the "Earliest Sea Song," so here it is. Despite Stone, obviously it isn't the first sea song, and I'm pretty sure it's not the oldest surviving sea song even in English.
It certainly doesn't look "folk," with its stanzas consisting of three-foot lines in eight-line stanzas rhyming aaabcccb.
So how old is it? The only hints we have are the language (which does not seem very old to me) and the manuscript, Trinity R.3.19, plus the fact that it describes a sea-voyage to Santiago de Compostela.
Santiago, which is in the far northwest corner of Spain, is not actually on the seacoast, but it's close; it's probably easier for pilgrims to reach it by sea than from most of what is now Spain. "In [the reign of Alfonso II "the Chaste," 791-842]... there occurred a religious event of great importance, -- the finding of what was believed to be the tomb and body of the apostle Santiago (Saint James) in northwestern Galicia. The site was made the seat of a bishopric, and a village grew up there, names Santiago de Compostela. Compostela became a leading political and industrial factor in the Christian northwest, but was far more important as a holy place of the first grade, ranking with Jeusalem, Rome, and Loreto" (Chapman, p. 55). According to Smith, p. 53, the "finding" of St. James took place between 808 and 814. A few centuries later, Bishop Gelmiraz even established his own private navy for the town, showing the importance of the sea to the pilgrim trade (Chapman, p. 95).
Thus the earliest possible date is in the ninth century, but given that the song is in relatively comprehensible English, it must be at least 400 years later, and even that seems early. As for the latest date, the fact that English pilgrims are going to a Catholic shrine obviously implies a date before the Protestant Reformation. So we can surely say that it is from before 1560, and probably before 1540. (In any case, the cult of Saint James at Santiago peaked in the twelfth through fifteenth centuries and was in decline in the sixteenth; OxfordSaints, p. 269).
The manuscript is written on paper, not parchment. The binding, which is not contemporary, has the arms of George Wilmer, who died in 1626 (Seymour, p. 95). Seymour, p. 136, suggests that at least one of the scribes was from the east Midlands working in London.
Manly/Rickert, p. 533, say that the various sections date from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They think (p. 534) it might have been made in the shop of John Shirley, although after his death.
The manuscript is large and diverse; the Digital Index of Middle English Verse counts 59 items in its 248 folios (about a fifth of them blank, perhaps set aside for items that were not at hand when the text was originally written). But it has much Chaucer (the Legend of Good Women; the Parliament of Fowls, parts of the Canterbury Tales, and a few short items) and a lot of Lydgate, plus miscellaneous lyrics. It is, however, composite -- a collection of independent booklets (Seymour, p. 95). These remained separate for long enough that the outer pages of some of the booklets suffered soiling and damage. Seymour, in his content list on pp. 96-98, divides its 32 quires into 13 sections; Manly/Rickert, p. 533, suggest 14. Seymour, p. 97, places this poem in section 10 (quires 26-27, folios 205-217), along with seven other fairly short pieces: "Discriving of fayre lady" (IMEV #1300), "O mosy quince" (IMEV #2524), Lydgate's "Horns away" (IMEV #2625), "Looke well" (IMEV #1944), Lydgate's "They that no while endure" (IMEV #55), "Proverbs of Wisdom" (IMEV #3502), and "How the Good Wife" (IMEV #671).
Seymour, p. 23, declares that the text of Chaucer's Parliament is derived from Caxton's 1477-1478 edition, and pp. 136-137 say that theCanterbury Tales extracts are also from Caxton (the original 1478 edition rather than the corrected edition of 1483); Manly/Rickert, p. 533, agree. The fact that the two Chaucer poems are certainly from after 1478 is not definitive for this piece, since it's in a separate booklet, but Manly/Rickert, p. 533, think that the bulk of the Trinity manuscript, folios 55-213, are from a single cursive hand, using yellowish-brown changing to reddish-brown ink. Thus it is likely that the quire containing this piece is from the same scribe as the one who copied Caxton's Chaucer text, and probably from the same post-1478 period.
Thus a good approximate date for the manuscript is c. 1500. I would guess the poem, at least in its current form, not much older.
There is a published facsimile of the manuscript, B. Y. Fletcher, M.S. Trinity College R. 3. 19. A facsimile (1987). Good luck finding a copy. - RBW
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