The Parsed Corpus of
Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
Sinners Beware
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About the edition and manuscript base:
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| Text name: | Sinners Beware |
| Alternative names: | Sayings of Saint Bede; This holy ghosts might; The saws of Saint Bede; Þeos holy gostes myhte |
| Content: | Sinners Beware admonishes its audience against sin and urges timely repentance. May the Holy Ghost protect against the devil, who labours day and night to ensnare mankind and to dwell within sinners (ll. 1–24). Life is brief and in need of purification (ll. 25–36). Heaven is bliss while hell is full of pain (ll. 37–60). The audience is exhorted (ll. 61-66) and called to reptent (ll. 67-72). The seven deadly sins are enumerated (ll. 73–84). Then follows a catalogue of sinners of each rank and the torments awaiting them (ll. 85–174). This section constitutes the earliest known "estates satire", a recurring trope in Middle English poetry that comically survey the whole nation conceived as a set of occupations or estates (Parsons 2008). The audience is warned of deferring repentance to the deathbed since none but Christ himself knows one's end-day (ll. 175–192). The body will decay; leave pride behind (ll. 193–216). The audience should confess immediately before a priest (ll. 217–258). The Last Judgment at the Mount of Olivet will reunite the good and the wicked (ll. 259–264). Christ appears bearing the bleeding Cross and the wounds of his Passion (ll. 265–270). A dialogue drawn from the parable of the sheep and goats (Matthew 25) addresses in turn the good and the wicked with the saved to be sent to heavenly bliss and the damned to everlasting darkness (ll. 271–324). The fiends punish the damned (ll. 325–330). The soul reproaches the body as the author of its ruin (ll. 331–336). The blessed look on their condemned kindred without pity (ll. 337–342). The poem closes with a final exhortation to lead an upright life, so as to be angels' companions at Doomsday, and a prayer with a concluding Amen (ll. 343–353). |
| Genre/subjects: | penitential poem, didactive poem, homiletic poem, devotional work, sermon, religious instructions, religious treatise, spiritual advice, sayings, proverbs, bible paraphrase, joys of Heaven, pains of Hell, the Deadly Sins, shrift, Domsday, complaint of the Soul to the Body theme, estates satire, social lament |
| Dialect of original composition: | Unknown The original dialect of the text has not been established. A northern dialect is unlikely. Verb placement patterns, as described in Kroch & Taylor (1997), are typical of Southern, rather than Northern, Middle English texts as the finite verb is always placed after a fronted constituent and a subject pronoun (Þeos we auhte vnderstonde. (line 84) 'Those [things], we should understand') whereas non-pronominal subjects can also immediately follow a verb after a fronted constituent, creating verb-second patterns (Þes Munekes weneþ summe. ... (line 115) 'Of these monks, some expect ...'). The text does not feature any distinctively northern vocabulary. (The poem does not contain rhymes of Old English long a with Old English long o, which would have been additional evidence in favour of an area of composition south of the river Humber.) It is possible that the dialect of the original and the West-Midlands scribal dialect are comparable. However, imperfect rhymes like heorte : smerte (lines 333, 336) 'heart : cause pain' may also indicate an original dialect region where eo had unrounded to e like the East Midlands. |
| Date of original composition: | 1175-1280 The date of the archetype of Sinners Beware has not been discussed in detail. The terminus ante quem must lie at least slightly prior to its manuscript witness to allow for sufficient transmission time for a later, extended witness of the text in a manuscript from before c. 1283 (see general notes). A terminus post quem is harder to identify. The poem might originally have been composed as early as the 12th century. Sentential negation is formed thirty times with ne alone (83%), Ne may no tunge telle (line 38) 'No tongue may tell', six times with ne as well as not, Ne schulle we nouht beo here (lines 25) 'We shall not be here', and never with not alone. This corresponds better with an earlier than a later part of the dating bracket (Newberry et al. 2017: Figure 4). Four examples of the wh temporal subordinator when contrast with three th‑based items in this function (57%) leading to a similar conclusion (Zimmermann 2020: Figure 2). The text was therefore placed in PCMEP period 1b (1200-1250). |
| Suggested date: | 1230 |
| PCMEP period: | 1b (1200-1250) |
| Versification: | 59 six-line stanzas with the rhyming scheme aab-aab, usually two stresses per line |
| Index of ME Verse: | 3607 (IMEV), 3607 (NIMEV 3607) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 5698 |
| Wells: | 7.31 |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | Sayings St.Bede |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | Morris, Richard. 1872. An Old English Miscelany. EETS o.s. 49. London: Trübner & Co. 72-83. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | Oxford, Jesus College 29, Part 2, ff. 175r–178v |
| Online manuscript description: | Catalogue of Western manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries and selected Oxford colleges LAEME Manuscripts of the West Midlands (item 4) |
| Manuscript dialect: | West-Midlands The manuscript comes from the "South-West" (Wells 1916: 409). The scribal dialect has been localized to Herefordshire (McIntosh et al. 1986: 199). |
| Manuscript date: | s. xiii-ex The manuscript dates from "c. 1275" (Wells 1916: 409). The manuscript was made in the late thirteenth century (Ker 1963: ix, xvi). The online version of the Middle English Dictionary dates the manuscript as a1300. |
About the file:
| File name: | M1b.SinnersBeware |
| ID: | SinnersBeware,x.y.z: x=page, y=line, z=token |
| Word count: | 1,606 |
| Token count: | 137 |
| Line count: | 354 Three lines missing in stanza 47, plus a final "Amen" |
Other:
| General notes: | A slightly extended, closely related version of the text is þe Sawe of Seint Bede (IMEV 1229, DIMEV 2042, edition Horstmann 1881: 505-10, in Oxford, Bodleian Library Digby 86 (SC 1687), ff. 127v-130r). It lacks four stanzas found in Jesus 29, and possesses seven new ones (Fein 2022: introduction to item 4). |
| Remarks on parses: | The edition used for the parsed file includes acute accents over some vowels. They have been silently removed (e.g., béte changed to bete, line 68). Hortative expressions such as Vte we leten ... 'We should let...' (l. 229) or Bidde we ... 'Let us pray...' (l. 349) are parsed as IP-IMP with an overt first person plural subject. The parses are largely unproblematic. |
References
Fein, Susanna. 2022. The Owl and the Nightingale and the English Poems of Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29 (II). (II) Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications. (available online)
Horstmann, Carl. 1881. Altenglische Legenden: Mit Einleitung und Anmerkungen. Heilbronn: Gebrüder Henninger. (available online)
Kroch, Anthony & Taylor, Ann. 1997. 'Verb Movement in Old and Middle English: Dialect Variation and Language Contact.' In: Kemenade, Ans van & Vincent, Nigel (eds.) Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 45-68.
Morris, Richard. 1872. An Old English Miscellany. EETS o.s. 49. London: Trübner & Co. (available online)
Newberry, Mitchell G., Ahern, Christopher, Clark, Robin & Joshua Plotkin. 2017. 'Detecting evolutionary forces in language change.' Nature 551, 223–226. (available online)
Parsons, Ben. 2008. '"The werste lay that euer harper sange with harp": the forms of Early Middle English satire.' Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 39.1, 113-135. (available online)
Zimmermann, Richard. 2020. 'Testing causal associations in language change: The replacement of subordinating then with when in Middle English.' Journal of Historical Syntax 4.4, 1-59. (available online)