“Why would anyone do that?”

I happened to see a student I’d lost sometime this semester after my last class, and as we were chatting, she asked why I’m a medievalist. My glib answer is always “Because it’s hard.” More honestly, it’s because medievalists are expected to know a lot, and we get to dabble in history, philosophy, language, literature, religion, art, and so on, regardless of our specialty; those focusing on literature, it seems, have more opportunity to go into these other fields, and that's one of the (many) reasons I've chosen it. I also noted that, as an English scholar, I get to work with poems like this one. When I pointed out the poem’s double entendre, she asked, quite earnestly, “Why would anyone do that?” This got me thinking. I’m always amused by the poem – it’s a bawdy side of the Middle Ages that often gets hidden behind the shining armor, chivalric aspirations, and religious dogma that represents the period in pop culture. Even the naysayers, those who see the period as a nasty, brutish, dirty place overlook gems like this because there can be no light in the Dark Ages, the middle between the greatness of Rome and its return via the Humanists or the breaking of Roman Catholic power by the Protestants. This poem is, for me, humor, it’s subtlety, it’s allegory (if you want to be grotesque). Eve Salisbury’s reading* is one that calls attention to the “continuing anxieties of husbands over issues of women's domestic power and the consequences of henpecking that ... suggest that concern over masculinity and reputation for prowess among men remains an issue as firmly entrenched as marriage itself” (p. 23). She later notes “the lyric parodies love songs usually directed toward a lady” (pp. 271–72), but leaves the reading at that. Another editor, Thomas G. Duncan, collects it in a section of “Miscellaneous Lyrics,” but refuses to engage it any further than to note a resonance with Chaucer’s description of Chauntecleer in his Nun’s Priest’s Tale and to obliquely recognize “the sexual innuendo,” which is compared to a nursery rhyme, perhaps to diffuse its power.** But the question remains: why would anyone do that? Why would anyone write such a poem? I think my current answer is simply this: manuscripts were precious things, and the texts contained therein were likely read and re-read, studied and reviewed in free time. Although this poem might seem fairly obvious today, and no doubt the innuendo was obvious then, it still takes a little thought to get beyond the obvious, surface meaning (describing the rooster), and the aptness of the description’s alternate meaning is sure to delight the teenager in all of its readers, while the more cerebral reader might appreciate the challenge of reading some more ennobling meaning into it. Regardless, it’s a short poem that appears in a single manuscript,*** and would likely be encountered as a brief diversion between more intellectual pieces. While we can only theorize on its original purpose, it's a fun little poem, and that's worth something in itself.

*Eve Salisbury, ed., The Trials and Joys of Marriage (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002).

**Duncan, ed., Medieval English Lyrics, 1200–1400 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), where the poem appears on pp. 168–69 and the notes on pp. 245–46. The nursery rhyme to which Duncan refers is “Goosey, Goosey, Gander.”

***The manuscript is London, British Library, MS Sloane 2593, fol. 10v. “Cock” is preceded by “I syng a of a myden,” and is followed by “Omnes gentes plaudite” on the page.