Produced by Louise Hope, Charlene Taylor, JackMcJiggins, David Garcia and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net [Transcriber’s Note: This e-text includes characters that require UTF-8 (Unicode) file encoding: Ȝ ȝ (yogh: very common) ⁊ (Tironian ampersand) ā ē ī ō ū (vowels with macron) If any of these characters do not display properly--in particular, if the diacritic does not appear directly above the letter--or if the apostrophes and quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, make sure your text reader’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change the default font. As a last resort, use the Latin-1 version of the file instead. Mid-word italics representing expanded abbreviations are shown in {braces}. Whole-word italics are shown conventionally with _lines_. Braces are also used with ^ (caret) for mid-word superscripting (rare); superscripts that continue to the end of the word use ^ alone. Boldface is shown with #marks#. Text in [[double brackets]] was added by the transcriber. Except for footnotes, single brackets are in the original. The pointing-finger symbol is shown as -->. The combinations m~, n~ and d~ represent letters with a decorative curl. In the editorial material, some text formatting has been simplified or omitted to reduce visual clutter: --Footnotes were italicized, with emphatic words in Roman (non-italic) type; this has been “toggled” to plain type with italic emphasis. --Glossary entries were shown in #boldface#, as were all references to “#A# version” and “#B# version”. --In the Glossary, page-and-line references in the form “15.33” gave the line number in smaller type. The author’s father was James Murray of the Oxford English Dictionary.] Erthe upon Erthe EARLY ENGLISH TEXT SOCIETY Original Series, No. 141 1911 (reprinted 1964) Price 30_s._ [Illustration: BRITISH MUSEUM, MS. HARL. 2253. c. 1307. fol. 57 v. (_slightly reduced_)] Early English Text Society. Original Series. The Middle English Poem, ERTHE UPON ERTHE, Printed From Twenty-Four Manuscripts, Edited, with Introduction, Notes, and Glossary, by HILDA M. R. MURRAY _Published for_ THE EARLY ENGLISH TEXT SOCIETY _by the_ OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO First Published 1911 Reprinted 1964 Original Series, No. 141 Reprinted Lithographically in Great Britain at the University Press, Oxford by Vivian Ridler Printer to the University To my Father QUEM QUAMVIS LONGISSIMO INTERVALLO SEQUI TAMEN CONOR. CONTENTS