I'm not a pasta-eating howler monkey, I'm a research monkey
So I'm tooling around the Internet this afternoon looking for a particular medieval lyric, and I come across this site, which is a collection of Middle English poetry with translations. There's one on there which the editor titles "History Lesson, 1381." I reproduce it here in its entirety:
"The ax was sharpe, the stokke was harde,
In the xiii yere of Kyng Richarde."
Simple enough, no? It's a reference to the suppression of the Peasants' Revolt in June 1381 (when Richard was in fact fourteen years old; the site editor emends "xiii" to "fourteenth" in his translation). However, if you look at the poem on the site and click the "original text" link, it gives the title "ON THE YEAR 1390-1," which apparently comes from the copy text, K. Sisam's Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose. And, furthermore, 1390 was in fact the thirteenth year of Richard's reign, which is the context in which the formula in the second line usually occurs (documents from the Middle Ages often give the year of the current king's reign, so it'd be something like in anno regni xiii Ricardi Secundi).
Now, someone who's less of a geek would probably have just figured that there's at least one and possibly two typos at work here. Is it sick that I spent much of my afternoon pondering alternate explanations and puttering about in a couple of reference books to see if the couplet could possibly refer to something else?
As it turns out, I didn't turn up much, which really isn't surprising -- there wasn't anything going on in England in 1390 that would inspire a bit of verse like the one I quoted. (I did find a rather entertaining account of a tournament drawn from Froissart's chronicles, though.) So yes, it is probably about the Peasants' Revolt, and the numbers got frelled up somewhere along the line. But I can resist neither Ricardian matters nor scholarly (or even semischolarly) wild goose chases. Go me. ;-)
I should email the webmaster and ask about it anyway, though.
BTW, the site where I got the Froissart is very cool and well worth investigating. Even if it's notably silent about Chaucer's terrible secret. ;-)
Update: A bit of googling turned up this equally brief bit of verse. See especially the final line and accompanying note. (Also, the bit about Gower is hugely interesting in light of future events.) I also determined that all other sources, besides the site at which I found the couplet in the first place, read "the xiiij yere," which makes more sense. So that at least was a typo.
(Incidentally? Slurp.)
"The ax was sharpe, the stokke was harde,
In the xiii yere of Kyng Richarde."
Simple enough, no? It's a reference to the suppression of the Peasants' Revolt in June 1381 (when Richard was in fact fourteen years old; the site editor emends "xiii" to "fourteenth" in his translation). However, if you look at the poem on the site and click the "original text" link, it gives the title "ON THE YEAR 1390-1," which apparently comes from the copy text, K. Sisam's Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose. And, furthermore, 1390 was in fact the thirteenth year of Richard's reign, which is the context in which the formula in the second line usually occurs (documents from the Middle Ages often give the year of the current king's reign, so it'd be something like in anno regni xiii Ricardi Secundi).
Now, someone who's less of a geek would probably have just figured that there's at least one and possibly two typos at work here. Is it sick that I spent much of my afternoon pondering alternate explanations and puttering about in a couple of reference books to see if the couplet could possibly refer to something else?
As it turns out, I didn't turn up much, which really isn't surprising -- there wasn't anything going on in England in 1390 that would inspire a bit of verse like the one I quoted. (I did find a rather entertaining account of a tournament drawn from Froissart's chronicles, though.) So yes, it is probably about the Peasants' Revolt, and the numbers got frelled up somewhere along the line. But I can resist neither Ricardian matters nor scholarly (or even semischolarly) wild goose chases. Go me. ;-)
I should email the webmaster and ask about it anyway, though.
BTW, the site where I got the Froissart is very cool and well worth investigating. Even if it's notably silent about Chaucer's terrible secret. ;-)
Update: A bit of googling turned up this equally brief bit of verse. See especially the final line and accompanying note. (Also, the bit about Gower is hugely interesting in light of future events.) I also determined that all other sources, besides the site at which I found the couplet in the first place, read "the xiiij yere," which makes more sense. So that at least was a typo.
(Incidentally? Slurp.)