"Haue Mercy of Me" (Psalm 51): An Unedited Alliterative Poem from the London Thornton Manuscript

Abstract

It is remarkable that the poem printed here has so long remained unedited and inaccessible. It is the only work contained in the London Thornton manuscript (B.L., MS Add. 31042) not already available, in some version, in print.2 Moreover, the associations of this poem are significant. Haue Mercy of Me is a paraphrase of one of the Seven Penitential Psalms, and thus linked to a longstanding tradition of psalm translation for lay devotional use when scriptural translation was otherwise restricted or banned. Moreover, its verse form is densely alliterative, with concatenation and a twelve-line stanza, known elsewhere in alliterative verse only in Pearl. Robert Thornton, a landed gentleman of fifteenth-century Yorkshire, preserved for us, in his two famous manuscripts-this one and Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 91-a valuable record of his literary tastes and pietistic habits.3 The books were evidently designed for private or domestic use and remained within the Thornton family for several generations. Some of the matter would have made edifying reading for the family circle (the pious romances); some had practical application (prognostications of weather, a medical manual); some were probably included for home instruction on the basic tenets of the Christian faith. Many texts, perhaps the majority, seem to have been gathered by Thornton as aids to private meditation or to domestic group devotions.4 The Lincoln manuscript evinces an arrangement of