THE PEARL-POET AND JOHN MASSEY OF COTTON, CHESHIRE

Abstract

WITH I N the last few years, several pieces of evidence have been brought forward which strongly suggest that a man with the name 'J. Massey' was the author of the Middle English Pearl and of the alliterative saint's legend, St. Erkenwald. As the Pearl-poet is widely considered to be the poet of the other poems of MS. Cotton Nero A. x, Cleanness, Patience, and Gawain and the Green Knight, the identification, if correct, gives us the name, at least, of a major English poet, a man who hitherto has been persistently anonymous. The evidence for this identification has been based in part on the discovery of a poetic reference by Thomas Hoccleve to a contemporary named, simply, 'maister Massy' and who was, according to Hoccleve, greatly skilled in the arts of poetry. At the same time that this reference was noticed, an anagram was found in the Pearl which, unravelled, yielded the signature J. Massi. It was conjectured from the fact that the proper name 'John' yielded theJ of the anagrammatic signature that John may have been the poet's Christian name. This anagram was later confirmed by the discovery of the same signature in St. Erkenwald (sometimes attributed to the Pearl-poet) where it is built into an anagram based strictly upon the numerology of the Pearl anagram. In St. Erkenwald, the anagram again contains the initial J.I The short poem by Hoccleve which devotes 18 of its 27 lines to Massey is included as an envoy in a mid fifteenth-century manuscript of Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes (B.M. MS. Royal D. xviii, f. Ioor). The only other known manuscript of the poem (one which presents a somewhat better text) is headed: 'Ce feust mys en le livre de monseigneur Johan, lors nommez, ore Regent de France & Duc de Bedford.'z Together the two texts