[11.] MS. clearly est, perh. error for erth.
[12.] MS. y9 = þus, perh. for þis.
[NOTES.]
[Page 1.] MS. Harl. 2253. These four lines were apparently regarded by Wanley, together with the preceding French strophe, as forming part of the poem on the Death of Simon de Montfort, and are not noted by him in the British Museum Catalogue. Böddeker also omitted them from his Altenglische Dichtungen des MS. Harl. 2253 (Berlin 1878). They were, however, already noted by Pinkerton in 1786, see Ancient Scottish Poems never before in print . . . from the MS. Collections of Sir Richard Maitland, ii, Note on p. 466: ‘In the same (i.e. Harleian) library, No. 2253, is another of the same kind, beginning,
Erthe toc of erthe erthe wyth wote.
It is only one stanza; and another piece of one stanza preceding it, both are put by Mr. Wanley, in the Catalogue, as part of a French song on Sir Simon de Montfort, which they follow: but such mistakes frequently arise from the crowded manner of old MSS.’ The facsimile opposite the title-page shows the lines as they occur in the MS.
[Page 5.] William Billyng’s MS. The ‘finely written and illuminated parchment roll’ described by William Bateman in his preface to Billyng’s Five Wounds of Christ, of which forty copies were privately printed by him at Manchester in 1814, contained the following poems:—
1. The Five Wounds of Christ (fifteen stanzas in rime royal).
2. At hygh none whan the belle dothe tylle (eighteen lines).