Education -- Early works to 1800; England -- Social life and customs -- Early works to 1800; Etiquette; Home economics -- Early works to 1800; Table
Guillaume de Deguilleville, monk of the Cistercian abbey of Chaalis, in
the diocese of Senlis, wrote his first verse _Pèlerinaige de l’Homme_ in
1330-1 when he was 36.[1] Twenty-five (or six) years after, in 1355, he
revised his poem, and issued a second version of it,[2] a revision of
which was printed ab. 1500. Of the prose representative of the first
version, 1330-1, a prose Englishing, about 1430 A.D., was edited by Mr.
Aldis Wright for the Roxburghe Club in 1869, from MS. Ff. 5. 30 in the
Cambridge University Library. Other copies of this prose English are in
the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, Q. 2. 25; Sion College, London; and the
Laud Collection in the Bodleian, no. 740.[3] A copy in the Northern
dialect is MS. G. 21, in St. John’s Coll., Cambridge, and this is the
MS. which will be edited for the E. E. Text Society. The Laud MS. 740
was somewhat condenst and modernised, in the 17th century, into MS. Ff.
6. 30, in the Cambridge University Library:[4] “The Pilgrime or the
Pilgrimage of Man in this World,” copied by Will. Baspoole, whose copy
“was verbatim written by Walter Parker, 1645, and from thence
transcribed by G. G. 1649; and from thence by W. A. 1655.” This last
copy may have been read by, or its story reported to, Bunyan, and may
have been the groundwork of his _Pilgrim’s Progress_. It will be edited
for the E. E. T. Soc., its text running under the earlier English, as in
Mr. Herrtage’s edition of the _Gesta Romanorum_ for the Society. In
February 1464,[5] Jean Gallopes--a clerk of Angers, afterwards chaplain
to John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France--turned Deguilleville’s first
verse _Pèlerinaige_ into a prose _Pèlerinage de la vie humaine_.[6] By
the kindness of Lord Aldenham, as above mentiond, Gallopes’s French text
will be printed opposite the early prose northern Englishing in the
Society’s edition.
The Second Version of Deguilleville’s _Pèlerinaige de l’Homme_, A.D.
1355 or -6, was englisht in verse by Lydgate in 1426. Of Lydgate’s poem,
the larger part is in the Cotton MS. Vitellius C. xiii (leaves 2-308).
This MS. leaves out Chaucer’s englishing of Deguilleville’s _ABC_ or
_Prayer to the Virgin_, of which the successive stanzas start with A, B,
C, and run all thro’ the alphabet; and it has 2 main gaps, besides many
small ones from the tops of leaves being burnt in the Cotton fire. All
these gaps (save the A B C) have been fild up from the Stowe MS. 952
(which old John Stowe completed) and from the end of the other imperfect
MS. Cotton, Tiberius A vii. Thanks to the diligence of the old
Elizabethan tailor and manuscript-lover, a complete text of Lydgate’s
poem can be given, though that of an inserted theological prose treatise
is incomplete. The British Museum French MSS. (Harleian 4399,[7] and
Additional 22,937[8] and 25,594[9]) are all of the First Version.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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