The Problem of Counsel in Mum and the Sothsegger

Abstract

The two verse fragments edited in 1936 under the title Mum and the Sothsegger have already proved useful to the historian of ideas and institutions. In 1939, Helen M. Cam made very good use of them to illustrate the relation of English members of parliament to their constituencies. More recently, Ruth Mohl, who followed the editors in considering them parts of a single poem, placed them in relation to the more formal aspects of medieval political thought. The usefulness of Mum and the Sothsegger has not, however, been exhausted. Indeed it remains, as both Miss Cam and Miss Mohl found it, a curiously neglected text. And one reason is that it has not been studied for what the author undoubtedly intended it to be, namely a substantial (if not closely knit) and only partially satirical commentary on the problem of counsel.