3. Erth owte of Erth (six stanzas).

4. Pes maketh plente (five lines).

The whole is signed Willm̃ Billyng. It has been frequently suggested that Billyng was the author of these poems, but it is evident that he was not the author of Erthe upon Erthe, though his may be one of the earliest transcripts of the B version, and the lines Pes maketh plente also occur elsewhere, cf. MS. Digby 230 (fifteenth century). He may have been the author of The Five Wounds of Christ, but it is more probable, considering the usual origin of other fifteenth-century collections of the kind, that he was merely the collector and transcriber of the texts. Cf. F. J. Furnivall, Notes and Queries, IV. iii. 103. It is possible that this may be the William Billyng who, in 1474, became rector of Toft Monks in Norfolk on the presentation of the Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, and who appears to have held the benefice until 1506 (see Notes and Queries, III. iv. 173; Blomefield, Norfolk, viii. 63).[1] The parchment roll was formerly preserved in Bateman’s collection of antiquities at Lomberdale House, Derbyshire. This collection was broken up and sold after Bateman’s death, the archaeological remains being purchased by the Sheffield Museum, and the books and MSS. sold at Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge’s rooms in 1893, but all attempts to trace Billyng’s MS. after the breaking up of the collection have been unsuccessful. A copy of the printed text is in the British Museum.

Montgomery’s reprint of the poem in 1827 was taken from Bateman’s version, and differs from it only in some very slight corrections in spelling. It has been suggested that this reprint was the source of the Earth upon Earth Epitaphs which occur, but these were current from the sixteenth century on, and, as has been already pointed out (see Introduction, pp. xxxvi ff.), the usual form of the Epitaph, even in the latest versions, differed from that of the actual poem.

[Page 7.] MS. Selden Supra 53. This text omits verse 5, and inverts the normal order of verses 4 and 6 (see Table on p. xvii of Introduction). The text is written in a neat hand in the left-hand column on the back of a spare leaf (fol. 159) at the end of the MS., after Lydgate’s Dance of Macabre. The right-hand column contains Latin scribblings, perhaps by the scribe who re-wrote small portions of Erthe upon Erthe (see p. 7, footnotes). A few lines are scribbled in another hand upon the front side of the leaf, which is otherwise blank. The back of the leaf was evidently unprotected, and is much rubbed and worn. The space below Lydgate’s last verse and colophon on fol. 158 vo contains two odd stanzas in English in the same metre as Lydgate’s poem, beginning ‘Let se your hand my ladi, dam emperys’, in a hand of the late fifteenth century, and a French stanza of four lines (‘Qui met son cuer tout en Deu, Il a son cuer et si a Deu’, &c.) in a French hand, perhaps as late as 1500. Both of these were quite possibly inserted in the MS. later than Erthe upon Erthe, the exact date of which is indeterminate, but it was probably copied in between 1450 and 1500.

[Page 8.] MS. Egerton 1995. This MS. was evidently a Commonplace book. Its contents are described by Gairdner, Collections of a London Citizen (Camden Society, 1876). The MS. is written throughout in fifteenth-century hand, and appears to be the work of one scribe. Gairdner thinks the whole collection may be ascribed to William Gregory of the Skinners’ Company, who was Mayor of London in 1451, and who seems to have been the author of part, at least, of the Chronicle of London at the end of the MS.

[Page 10.] MS. Brighton. Fiedler’s account of this MS. is as follows:— ‘Noch eine andre Fassung des Gedichtes habe ich mir vor einigen Jahren aus einer Handschrift abgeschrieben, die damals im Besitze eines Antiquars in Brighton war, über deren weiteren Verbleib ich aber nichts ermitteln könnte. Es war eine Pergamenthandschrift, folio, von 90 Blättern. Sie enthielt eine lateinische Abhandlung über die sieben Sacramente “Oculi Sacerdotis”, und auf der ursprünglich frei gebliebenen Rückseite des letzten Blattes war von einer Hand des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts das englische Gedicht eingetragen.’ (Mod. Lang. Review, III. iii. 219.)

[Page 11.] Stratford-on-Avon Inscription. A full account of this inscription has been given in the Introduction, p. xii. The lines ‘Whosoo hym be thowghte’, there mentioned as being inscribed beneath Erthe upon Erthe, are given by Fisher as follows:—

Whosoo hym be thowght Inwardly and ofte

How hard hyt ys to flett