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A Middle English poem on the fleeting nature of material wealth.

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Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 229 (s. xiv) was one of the codices in the early collection of books belonging to the college, as is proven by an entry on the verso side of its last folio in a hand of the fourteenth century: `Liber Aule valence marie Cantabrig .' (1) The manuscript is an anthology of a number of theological texts in Latin particularly useful for preachers, among which is a copy from the first half of the fourteenth century of Peter of Limoges's late thirteenth-century Tractatus moralis de oculo, round here on fols [119.sup.ra]--[154.sup.vb]. (2) An early reader of this text, perhaps a student at the college or a later donor, added in the margin numerous glosses in Latin on his reading, as well as brief notations such as `narracio', `versus', and the like, that serve to highlight the material in Peter's work which was of special interest to him. At the bottom of fol. [125.sup.r] he also wrote a quatrain in Middle English on the topic of the transience of material wealth and its inferiority to spiritual goods. The presence of this religious verse in the midst of a series of Latin prose treatises is a further example of how the manuscript context of Middle English poetry is often a vital clue to recovering its conception by its composer or scribe, and a reminder that the context of much religious verse is often far removed from the anthologies of poetic composition in which most readers meet this poetry today. (3) The quatrain is written out as poetry in Pembroke MS 229 as follows:



Al was opir mens pat we wit fare. Al sal be opir mens pat we for kare. (4) Poure and nakit sol we hen fare. Pat we do for godis loue sol we haue and nan mare. (5)

The hand in which the Middle English poem and the glosses are preserved in Pembroke MS 229 demonstrates a number of early anglicana features (a t without ascender, a looped but still fairly upright d, and especially an l with an elaborately forked ascender) that give this text an archaic appearance, but these are also combined with the use of a secretary a in most of the rhyme words and in sal. The forked l is still found with some frequency in materials from England dating from the first quarter of the fourteenth century, and in fact a relatively close analogue to the specific combination of early anglicana and secretary features in the Pembroke hand can be identified in the writing of William Herebert (d. 1333). (6) Though the brevity of a sample of four lines of poetry is difficult to date with great precision, one can suggest nevertheless that the hand in Pembroke MS 229 belongs in the first half--perhaps as late as the second quarter--of the fourteenth century. The form sal and the retention of OE [[bar]a] witnessed in the words nan and mare indicate that the author, or the copy-text of this poem, may have originated in the northern dialect region of England, but the dialect features of the text are not purely northern, as the form sol demonstrates, as well as, perhaps, the form hen. (7) It is probable, in any case, that the original form of the poem contained the northern features still present in the rhyme word mare, for without the retention of OE [[bar]a] there would be no continuity in the prosodic device of a singular rhyme. Moreover, the other contexts in which the quatrain has been transmitted show...