Maiden in the mor lay

(early 14th century)

   Maiden in the mor lay is an enigmatic and haunting Middle English lyric popular in the early 14th century. The text consists of four stanzas of seven short lines each, full of repetitions (the first two lines of each stanza are repeated in lines five and six, while line three is repeated in line four). The final, slightly longer line completes the focus of the verse, in all but the first stanza answering a question asked in the first line:What did the maiden eat? The primerole (i.e., primrose) and the violet.What did she drink? The cold water of the well-spring.What was her bower? The red rose and the lily flower. Between 1317 and 1360, Richard de Ledrede, the Franciscan bishop of Ossory in Ireland, complained that the minor clergy of his cathedral spent their time singing scandalous secular lyrics in English and French. He composed some 60 Latin lyrics to be sung to the tunes of the secular verses, some of whose titles were preserved to indicate which tunes the Latin lyrics were intended to use. One of these was “Maiden in the mor.” The text of the English lyric is preserved, apparently somewhat serendipitously, on a narrow strip of parchment that preserves 12 short pieces, including several dance songs (among them the lyric Ich am of Irelaund that inspired Yeats’s poem “I am of Ireland”). The parchment scrap was attached to the Bodleian manuscript Rawlinson D 913, and the short poems contained thereon are known as the “Rawlinson lyrics.”

   Though almost all readers are charmed by the incantation-like tone of Maiden in the mor, interpretations of the text have varied widely. Robertson (1951) interpreted the poem as religious allegory, claiming that the moor represented the wilderness of the world before the coming of Jesus Christ, while the cold water of the well symbolized the grace of God. The maiden was the Virgin Mary, the primrose a symbol of her earthly beauty, and the violet a figure of humility, while the rose and the lily had their conventional medieval connotations of charity and purity—all qualities associated chiefly with the Virgin.

   Other scholars, however, like the bishop of Ossory, have seen the poem as secular, even pagan. Speirs describes the maiden as a faery being, the Spirit of the well-spring. He speculated that the poem was connected with fertility dances aimed at magically influencing the forces of nature. Peter Dronke (1966) sees a relationship between the Moor Maiden and a water sprite of Germanic legend who, according to myth, appeared at dances and charmed men, but had to return to the moor at a preordained time lest she die. No single interpretation is accepted by a consensus of scholars. The poem remains suggestive and ambiguous, which is part of its fascination.

   Bibliography

   ■ Davies, R. T., ed.Middle English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

   ■ Dronke, Peter. The Medieval Lyric. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.

   ■ Speirs, John. Medieval English Poetry: The Non-Chaucerian Tradition. London: Faber and Faber, 1957.

   ■ Robertson, D.W., Jr. “Historical Criticism.” In English Institute Essays: 1950, edited by A. S. Downer, 3–31.New York: Columbia University Press, 1951.