This Endris Night

DESCRIPTION: "This endris night I saw a sight, a star as bright as day, And ever among, a maiden sung, Lulley, by-by, lullay." The baby Jesus and his mother discuss his future: He will be great, and the mighty will bow to him -- but for now he asks her to care for him
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: before 1537 (Hill MS., Balliol Coll. Oxf. 354)
KEYWORDS: religious Jesus mother MiddleEnglish
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (20 citations):
Dearmer/VaughnWilliams/Shaw-OxfordBookOfCarols 39, "This Endris Night" (1 text, 1 tune)
Greene-TheEarlyEnglishCarols, #151, pp. 10-12, "(no title)" (3 texts)
Rickert-AncientEnglishChristmasCarols, pp. 62-63, "This Endernight I saw a sight" (1 text, with a slightly different meter but enough similar words that I think it should be mentioned here)
Sidgwick/Chambers-EarlyEnglishLyrics LVIV, pp. 121-123, "(no title)" (1 text); compare LXIII, pp. 119-120; LXXXVII, pp. 157-158
Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, #3627; compare #3596
DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #5729; compare #5683
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), #35, pp. 25-26, "[This enders nyght I saw a sight]" (1 text), with two additional texts and variant readings from a third on pp. 174-176
Richard Greene, editor, _A Selection of English Carols_, Clarendon Medieval and Tudor Series, Oxford/Clarendon Press, 1962, #41, pp. 99-101, "(This endurs nyght)" (1 text)
John Julian, editor, _A Dictionary of Hymnology_, 1892; second edition 1907 (I use the 1957 Dover edition in two volumes), p. 209
Thomas Wright, _Song and Carols, Now First Printed, From a Manuscript of the FIfteenth Century_, Percy Society, 1847, #X, p. 12, ("Thys endrys ny3th") (1 text)
Celia and Kenneth Sisam, _The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse_, Oxford University Press, 1970; corrected edition 1973, #210, pp. 466-469, "Lullay, By-by, Lullay"; #212, pp. 472-473, "Lullay, my child" (2 texts)
Thomas G. Duncan, editor, _Late Medieval English Lyrics and Carols 1400-1530_, Penguin Books, 2000, #66, p. 75, "This endrys nyght" (1 text)
cf. Carleton Brown, editor, Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century_, Oxford University Press, 1939, #5, pp. 7-8, "She Sang, Dear Son, Lullay" (1 text, with this first verse although the rest appears to be something else)
MANUSCRIPT: {MSRichardHill}, The Richard Hill Manuscript, Oxford, Balliol College MS. 354, folio 226 [IMEV #3627]
MANUSCRIPT: {MSEngPoetE1}, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. Poet. e.1 (Bodley 29734), folio 17 [IMEV #3627]
MANUSCRIPT: {MSHeege}, The Heege Manuscript, Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland MS. Advocates 19.3.1, folio 210 [IMEV #3627]
MANUSCRIPT: London, British Library, MS. Royal App. 58, folio 52 [IMEV #3627]
MANUSCRIPT: {MSEngPoetE1}, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. Poet. e.1 (Bodley 29734), folio 20 [IMEV #3596]
MANUSCRIPT: Cambridge, University Library MS. Additional 5943, folio 145 [IMEV #3596] (short text)
MANUSCRIPT: London, British Library MS. Additional 5666, folio 2 [IMEV #3596]
ST OBC039 (Partial)
NOTES [400 words]: Although no longer found in tradition, this seems to have been very popular in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It is in the Hill MS. (Balliol College, Oxford, 354, folio 226), in British Library MS. Add. 3192, in Sloane MS. 2593, Bodleian MS. Eng. poet. e.1 (folios 17v-18v), with music in British Library MS. Royal Appendix 58 (the manuscript most famous for containing "Westron Wind"), and in the Advocates Library, Edinburgh, MN. 19.3.1 (the source of Greene's text). The first verse is shown as a chorus in manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 189. Such wide currency, to me, implies that it belongs in the Index,
It is old enough that the Percy Society printing, at least, still uses a yogh (ȝ) rather than "gh."
In the circumstances, it's rather sad to note that nothing whatsoever in this song is Biblical.
One other irony -- the manuscript containing the version of this with music, Brirish Library Royal Appendix 58, is full of secular love lyrics ("A[h] the sighs that come from my heart," "For my pastime upon a day"/"Colle to me the rysshys grene," "The little pretty nightingale," "By a bank as I lay"), verses to a mistress (including the famous "Westron Wind"), and even an "erotic carol," "Kytt she wept; I axyde why soo"/"Kitt she wept I asked why so"/"Kitt hath lost her key."
There is another "This Endris Night" lyric, "This endris nyght, I saw a sygth, A mayd a cradyll kepe." This also occurs in Bodleian MS. Eng. poet. e.1; in addition it is in Cambridge University Library MS. Additional 5943 and in British Library Additional 5666. It very possibly deserves indexing too, but I decided it was sufficient to note it here, since it has not been printed as often. It's Brown/Robbins IMEV #3596, and Greene #151, and is cited in the manuscripts list after the list for IMEV #3627.
E. K. Chambers, English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1945, 1947, p. 108, suggests that a carol in the earlier Grimestone manuscript, indexed as "Als I Lay Upon a Nith (As I Lay Upon a Night)" (IMEV #352, four copies II) is somehow ancestral to this, but that strikes me as a little too conjectural to list that piece here.
For more on manuscript Sloane 2593, see the notes to "Robyn and Gandeleyn" [Child 115].
For more about the famous anthology Bodleian MS. Eng. Poet. e.1 (Bodleian 29734), see the notes to "The Golden Carol (The Three Kings)." - RBW
Last updated in version 6.8
File: OBC039

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