| (ll. 63, 64) | Erthe bygyth hallys & erthe bygith towres, When erth is layd in erth, blayke is his bours; |
as in the A version;
| (ll. 5, 7) | Erthe vpon erth has hallys & towris . . . But quan erth vpon erth has bygyd his bowres, |
as in the B version.
The two stanzas of the B version which contain these rime-words are the two which recur most frequently on tombstones and mural inscriptions, and it seems possible that they represent a second early form of the Erthe poems. It is evident that the rime-words gold : mold, bowres : towres, depend upon an early tradition. Probably verses similar to the short stanza in MS. Harl. 2253, and containing these words, were in existence before the learned writer of the longer A text in MS. Harl. 913 introduced them in his poem, and, becoming widely known, formed the nucleus of the B version. Both the A and the B versions might therefore be held to depend upon popular stanzas of this kind, which gave rise about the end of the thirteenth century to the long poem of MS. Harl. 913, and during the fourteenth century to the original of the B version, a poem in seven four-lined stanzas. The earlier version is connected more particularly with the Southwest Midland district; the later seems to have originated rather in the North or North Midlands, but it soon became known all over England, and is found in the South of Scotland shortly after 1500. Only one fifteenth-century writer, the author of the Cambridge text, shows direct knowledge of the A text, but the B version was evidently widely known, and a favourite theme for additions and modifications. On tombstones and mural inscriptions it survived up to the nineteenth century.
[ Later Versions of the Poem.]
As has been already pointed out, the Middle English texts of Erthe upon Erthe occur for the most part in the Commonplace Books of the day, often on the spare leaves at the beginning or end of the MS., as if the collector or some later owner had been struck by the poem and anxious to preserve it. That this interest was not confined to the fifteenth century is shown by the occurrence of the text in the Maitland and Reidpeth MSS. A still later instance of it occurs in the Pillerton Hersey Registers, dating from 1559 onwards, where the following verse has been scribbled on the last leaf, probably by some seventeenth-century clerk (cf. C. C. Stopes, Athenaeum, Sept. 19, 1908):—
Earth upon earth bould house and bowrs,
Earth upon earth sayes all is ours.
Earth upon earth when all is wroght,