Helen Barr (1)

This is a good next stop if you enjoyed Piers Plowman. Stylistically these poems are the same kind of thing. Rough alliterative verse as far as you can get from the polished lines of Chaucer’s court poetry. It’s the kind of thing a pub landlord would produce ex tempore after a couple of pints. This would be an eloquent pub landlord, if there is such a thing. I think it would be fair to say that they are not up to the literary standard of Langland. There are some passages of outstanding natural beauty if you like your vistas broken and boulder-strewn, but they’re more interesting than good. These poems are concerned with the politics of the day. Religion too, but the political end of its spectrum.

It’s not an easy read. It will help if you have some idea of the general flow of English history during this period. For the details there are the notes. They run as long as the poems and believe me you’re gonna need em. This edition is well done in a number of ways. Þ and Ȝ are replaced and something called punctuation is added but otherwise things are pretty much as they appear in the manuscripts. The only real problem I have is with the glossing. There’s no separate glossary and hard words are glossed to the right of the line. My eye was constantly being drawn to them even when I didn’t need them and it just breaks up the flow of your reading. Also the book really needs to be in landscape format as when the glosses run over into the next line it breaks up the text. Very annoying.… (meer)