Now Mercy, Lord, and Gramercy (As I Wanderede Her Bi Weste)

DESCRIPTION: "As I (walked/wandered) here by west, (far/fast) under a forest side, I saw a wight, went him to rest, Under a bow he (be)gan [to] (a)bide." The man reports and laments all his sins, begging, "Now mercy, Lord, and gramercy"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: c. 1400 (Vernon and Simeon manuscripts)
KEYWORDS: religious nonballad MiddleEnglish
FOUND IN: Britain(England)
REFERENCES (9 citations):
Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, #374
DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #631
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), #30, pp. 54-57, "[Now mercy, Lord, and gamercy]" (1 text)
Maxwell S. Luria & Richard Hoffman, _Middle English Lyrics_, a Norton Critical Edition, Norton, 1974 pp, 105-107, #104 (no title) (1 text) [based on the Vernon text]
Carleton Brown, editor, English Lyrics of the XIVth Century , Oxford University Press, 1924, #107, pp. 1164-167, "Merci God and graunt Merci" (1 text) [based on the Vernon text]
MANUSCRIPT: {MSRichardHill}, The Richard Hill Manuscript, Oxford, Balliol College MS. 354, folio 145
MANUSCRIPT: {MSHeege}, The Heege Manuscript, Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland MS. Advocates 19.3.1, folio 91
MANUSCRIPT: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Eng. Poet. a.1 (Bodleian 3938) [The Vernon Manuscript], folio 409
MANUSCRIPT: London, British Library, MS. Additional 22283 [The Simeon Manuscript], folio 131
NOTES [636 words]: It may seem strange to include a song in the index which exists only in medieval manuscripts, but there are hints that it existed in oral tradition. For starters, there is the fact that it exists in four medieval manuscripts:
-- Oxford, Bodleian Library Eng. poet. a.1 (SC 3938) (the famous Vernon manuscript, c. 1400, from the west midlands)
-- London, British Library Addit. 22283 (the Simeon manuscript, c. 1400, from the west midlands)
-- Oxford, Balliol College 354 (the great Richard Hill manuscript, from London, late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries)
-- Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates 19.3.1 (the Heege manuscript, late fifteenth century, thought to be from Nottinghamshire or thereabouts, containing only the first twelve lines)
This is really only three witnesses, since Vernon and Simeon were almost certainly part of the same project and copied from the same source. But still, three witnesses of a medieval poem is a high number. What's more, one of the three is Richard Hill's manuscript, which contains many folk songs. And the copies are from diverse parts of Britain (west midlands, Nottinghamshire, and probably London, although Richard Hill was apparently born in Hertfordshite). And they are separated by at least a century, perhaps as much as a century and a half. And there are substantial verbal differences between the Vernon/Simeon form and the Hill form, and the Heege form is said to be jumbled as well as short -- arguing for oral transmission.
Individually, none of these points is sufficient to argue for folk song status. Collectively, I consider them enough evidence that I include the piece, although I admit it's a marginal case.
This poem appears in the very last section of the Vernon Manuscript (folios 407-412; this poem is on p. 409, and is #13 in the series). According to John Burrow's article "The Shape of the Vernon Refrain Leaves," in Derek Persall, editor, Studies in the Vernon Manuscript, D. S. Brewer, 1990, pp. 187-199, this section contains 23 poems, all with stanzas of either eight or twelve lines, all derived from the French balade form (p. 187). The same 23 poems appear in the same order on folios 128v-133v of the Simeon manuscript, with only such differences as might occur when copied by two different scribes; clearly the 23 were originally found as a unit compiled by someone else. The form implies to Burrow (p. 188), that the poem is late fourteenth century, since the form does not occur in English before that.
Several of the other items in this part of the Vernon collection also appear in other manuscripts, almost always with differences in the form (Burrow, p. 189). Thus there may be several other orally-transmitted pieces in the collection.
The Heege manuscript, which contains this piece, also has #2 in the Vernon/Simeon collection (Burrow, pp. 189, 194). In both cases the poem is incomplete (#2 lacks two stanzas of the Vernon text; #13 is just a fragment). The Hill version of #13 is fuller, but lacks one stanza and rearranges the order of two others (Burrow, pp 194-195). In this case, Burrow thinks Vernon/Simeon have the best text, but elsewhere, the often have edited texts (Burrow, p. 196). This hints to me that none of the four copies is especially close to the original.
John J. Thompson, "The Textual Background and Reputation of the Vernon Lyrics" (Pearsall, pp. 201-224) says (p. 201) that all but three of the Vernon Lyrics have a refrain (in the Vernon copy, varying between "Ay, merci, God, and graunte merci" or "Nou merci, God, and graunt merci"). Thompson, p. 212, says that the Heege MS. copy of this poem was actually copied by John Hawghton, who worked with Richard Heege on the manuscript. Thus, most unusually, we know the names of two of the four scribes who copied this manuscript. - RBW
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