§ 144. Now, this unsystematic combination of Alexandrines and Septenaries is a metre which was especially in vogue in the Middle English period. In this metrical form two religious poems, The Passion of our Lord and The Woman of Samaria (Morris, Old English Miscellany), were composed so early as the beginning of the thirteenth century. From the first we quote ll. 21–4:
Léuedi þu bére þat béste chíld, | þat éuer wés ibóre;
Of þe he mákede his móder, | vor hé þe hédde ycóre.
Ádam ánd his ófsprung | ál hit wére furlóre,
Ýf þi súne nére, | ibléssed þu béo þervóre.
Many lines of these poems may be scanned in both ways; in the third line of the preceding extract, for instance, we may either take the second syllable of the word ofsprung, in the manner of the usual even-beat rhythm, to form a thesis (in this case hypermetrical, yielding an epic caesura), or we may regard it as forming, according to ancient Germanic usage, a fourth arsis of the hemistich, which would then belong to a Septenary. At any rate, this scansion would, in this case, be quite admissible, as indeed the other licences of even-beat rhythm all occur here.
It is in this metre that the South English Legends of Saints (Ms. Harleian 2277) and other poems in the same MS., as the Fragment on Popular Science (fourteenth century), are written. The same holds good for Robert of Gloucester’s Rhyming Chronicle (cf. Metrik, i, §§ 113, 114). Mätzner (in his Altengl. Sprachproben, p. 155), and Ten Brink (Literaturgeschichte, i, pp. 334, 345) concur in this opinion, while Trautmann (in Anglia, v, Anz., pp. 123–5), on a theory of metrical accentuation which we hold to be untenable, pronounces the verses to be Septenaries.
The following passage (Mätzner, Altengl. Sprachproben, i, p. 155) may serve to illustrate the versification of Robert of Gloucester:
Áftur kýng Báthulf | Léir ys sóne was kýng,
And régned síxti ȝér | wél þoru álle þýng.