_Erthe upon Erthe_ is perhaps more especially concerned with the first of the two conceptions mentioned above, man’s mortality, but, as has already been shown, a close connexion exists between it and the _Soul and Body_ poems, and though the idea of the duality in man is not mentioned, it is certainly present. The poem is more popular in form than either the _Dance of Death_ or the various _Soul and Body_ Dialogues, perhaps because of its purely English origin, and seems to represent a later and more popular product of the ideas which gave rise to the other two groups. Its short mono-rimed stanza, its jingling internal rime, and its half-riddling, half-punning character, appear to have especially commended it to popular favour, and it is significant that it became most widely-known in its simpler forms. EDITOR’S NOTE. In preparing the text of this edition, all the available MSS. have been consulted, the only two not examined being William Billyng’s MS. and the Brighton MS., which were formerly in the possession of private owners, and have eluded all search for them. As exhaustive a search as was possible has been made for other texts of the poem, but it has often escaped cataloguing, and it is probable that other copies of the B version, at least, exist. The punctuation, inverted commas, and regular use of initial capitals in the text are the Editor’s. The MSS. vary in their use of capitals, the same MS. being often inconsistent with itself, while the Cambridge text frequently employs them for unimportant words in the middle of the line, as p. 33, l. 45, Ar, &c. Capitals have been added in the case of all proper names. Letters and words which are obscure or illegible in the MS., or which appear to have been accidentally omitted, are enclosed in square brackets, and a hyphen has been inserted where the MS. separates a prefix or particle from the rest of the word. The MS. writings ff, þ, ȝ, v for u and vice versa, have been retained in the text, and ɫɫ, ŧħ, expanded to ll{e}, th{e}, but it was not thought advisable to expand m~, n~, to m{e}, n{e}, nor other letters such as d, r, g, when written with a final flourish. Fifteenth-century scribes appear to have used such flourishes at the end of the word rather as a matter of habit than with any particular meaning, and the forms to which expansion of them would lead, such as _one_, _onne_ for _on_, are frequently most improbable. It was therefore thought better to ignore such flourishes, or to indicate the persistent use of them by a footnote. [Transcriber’s Note: The mid-paragraph characters are “ll” and “th”, each with a single stroke through both letters.]