A Dyte of Womenhis Hornys
Surviving Copies of Lydgate
During the years between 1412 and 1451, the Benedictine monk John Lydgate composed nearly 145,000 lines of verse that survive today. Among this prolific outpouring is a lyrical ballad titled “a dyte of womenhis hornys.” Though it is considered one of Lydgate’s “minor poems,” the lyric appears in nine extant manuscript collections dating from the last years of Lydgate’s life to the turn of the sixteenth century: Bodleian Library Laud Misc. 683 (c.1449), Bodleian Library Ashmole 59 (c. 1456), British Library Harley 2255 (c. 1460), Cambridge University Library Hh.4.12 (c. 1475), British Library Harley 2251 (c. 1475), Trinity College, Oxford R.3.19 (c. 1478), British Library Addit. 34360 (c. 1500), Bodleian Library Rawlinson C.86 (c. 1500), and Jesus College, Oxford Q.G.8 (c. 1500). The level of production over a sustained period serves as evidence for the popularity of Lydgate’s poem among medieval audiences.
The endurance of this lyric may be due, in part, to Lydgate's association with Geoffrey Chaucer and his work. Though he was a close friend of Geoffrey's son Thomas, whether Lydgate ever met Geoffrey Chaucer is unknown. Regardless of their personal friendship, early readers recognized the thematic relationship that appears in the works of Lydgate—who frequently wrote in response to or continuation of Chaucer. This thematic (and possibly personal) relationship between the two writers contributes to Lydgate’s reputation and provides support for Chaucer-Lydgate anthologies. Lydgate’s poems appear alongside Chaucer’s works in four of the above-mentioned manuscripts (Cambridge Hh.4.12, Harley 2251, Trinity R.3.19, and Rawlinson C.86). Derek Pearsall claims that many collections “use famous Chaucer poems as bait and pad out the volume with fifteenth century imitations” (76). Indeed, a compilation such as Harley 2251 does contain a significant amount of Chaucer poetry together with Lydgate’s works, but to relegate Lydgate to the role of “Chaucer imitator” may not give enough credit to the level of interest in Lydgate as an established writer in his own right.
By the time the extant manuscripts were created (in the final year of his life and after his death), John Lydgate was already established as a famous writer. Douglas Gray has noted, “Lydgate’s reputation was at its height in the fifteenth century; he is praised again and again…as one of the masters of English poetry.” Indeed, Lydgate earned support from several patrons, including King Henry VI based on his literary talents. We see evidence of Lydgate’s individual fame through the five other early manuscripts. Laud 683, Ashmole 59, Harley 2255, Addit. 34360, and Jesus College Q.G.8 are all gatherings that appear in A. S. G. Edwards’ discussion of author-driven manuscript collections. According to Edwards, these texts seem to be deliberately assembled as a way to anthologize specific authors (101). This desire to gather Lydgate as an individual author or together with Geoffrey Chaucer has contributed to the survival of shorter works such as “a dyte of womenhis hornys.”
While the presence of multiple copies of a minor poem is indeed a rare joy, tracing the relationship between manuscript copies and attempting to gather information about surviving manuscripts and create a stemma is a challenging and incomplete task. The earliest of the manuscripts, Laud 683, was initially an exclusively Lydgatian collection (Edwards 108). In their work, Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375-1475, Edwards and Pearsall claim that Laud was produced by the unnamed “Lydgate scribe” at Bury St. Edmunds, the monastery where Lydgate lived until his death (268). Overall, the book contains little rubrication and the poems seem to flow into one another with few markers to suggest breaks in the lyrics (Bale 115).
After Lydgate’s death, the aging scribe John Shirley had a significant influence on the output of Lydgate’s poems in various anthologies and miscellanies. In 1456, Shirley copied Ashmole 59 from an unknown exemplar. Though she does not refer specifically to “of womenhis hornys,” Margaret Connelly posits that Shirley possibly possessed Lydgate’s manuscripts as exemplars that he used to copy other Lydgate poems in Ashmole (156). Yet this specific copy of the poem poses many textual problems when compared against the earliest text, Laud, as well as later manuscripts. While Ashmole contains significant marginalia (including the earliest attribution of the poem to John Lydgate), the text is poorly scribed, containing many transposed lines and missing two complete stanzas (see transcription). Pearsall and Connelly both note that Shirley was nearly ninety years old and infirm when he transcribed Ashmole, and the manuscript was likely the last writing he produced before his death later in 1456 (Pearsall 74, Connelly 156). Despite his age and declining health, the problems with Ashmole cannot be solely attributed to John Shirley without exploring the problems with the two other texts that derive from Shirley’s exemplar. Harley 2251 and British Addit 34360 were both produced by the “Hammond scribe” who had access to Shirley’s exemplars after his death (Mooney 183, Boffey 5). While none of the British Library manuscripts were available for consultation at the time of this edition’s production, The Digital Index of Middle English Verse indicates that these manuscripts only contain the first four stanzas of the poem.
Like Harley 2251 and Addit 34360, we know very little about the relationship between Lydgate and Harley 2255, which was also unavailable when this edition was initially produced. Harley 2255 is a quarto volume with elaborate rubrication prepared for William Curteys, the abbot at Bury (Pearsall 77). Pearsall claims that the volume was prepared under the direction of Lydgate, though this claim does not correspond to the dating of the text nearly ten years after Lydgate’s death. Nevertheless, since the manuscript was prepared at Bury for the abbot it is possible that the Harley 2255 witness of “womenhis hornys” derives an independent authority from the other texts, though we can only speculate this based on what Pearsall has indicated about the place of production and the recipient of the text.
We know even less about the remaining manuscripts, Trinity R.3.19 and Rawlinson C.86. Trinity R.3.19 is a particularly eclectic compliation of forty-five secular poems and one prose piece (Fletcher xv). The volume reveals the hands of four different scribes between 1478 and 1483 plus the sixteenth century additions by John Stow. “Womenhis hornys” is among the poems produced by Scribe A in the volume (xix). While the exemplars used for the production of this text are unknown, the text of “of womenhis hornys” in Trinity R.3.19 varies only slightly from Laud 683. Only one word has been changed (see editorial note on “stonys” to “golde”), and the removed words appear to be an attempt to regularize the meter. Likewise, we do not know what exemplars were used for Rawlinson C.86, though Edwards and Pearsall have noted that the manuscript is possibly related to Trinity R.3.19 because some of the unusual works such as Piers of Fulham and Guiscardo and Ghismonda present in Trinity are repeated in Rawlinson (290-291). Still the Rawlinson copy of “of womenhis hornys” contains many variants from Laud and Trinity, so the relationship between the two texts does not appear to extend to Lydgate’s lyric.
“Womenhis hornys” in Conversation and Contemplation
“Womenhis hornys” is a 72-line lyric of nine stanzas composed in an Eastern Midlands dialect. Following the 8-line ballad form, the poem plays with variations of iambic pentameter and a variety of unaccented syllables (MacCracken Minor Poems, viii). The poem consistently follows the ABABBCBC pattern in each of the stanzas, and maintains three rhymes throughout (the hard “e” sound of “bewte,” the –ence in “apparence” and the hard “a” sound in “away”). This tendency to repeat sounds heightens our awareness of the repetition of phrases that is characteristic of a homilist (MacCracken x).
The poem’s appearance in various secular, religious, and didactic collections make “womenhis hornys” difficult to categorize but also speaks to its appeal across various genres. Pearsall notes that the Harley lyrics contain practical and didactic verse, while Jessus College Q.G.8 has “lower-pitched,” secular lyrics, and Laud contains a miscellany of religious verse (76). Anthony Bale notes that the Laud manuscript wherein “womenhis hornys” first appears “contains texts concerned with the ‘household’ or domestic service, parental or ‘maternal’ texts, together with devotional fillers” (115). By addressing multiple audiences, this volume containing “of womenhis hornys” could be compiled without one specific group in mind.
While Laud 683 was initially owned by a woman, Mistress Cole, and can be seen as a “fashionable gentlewoman’s book,” this volume and the lyric “of womenhis hornys” should not be reduced merely to a book for women (Bale 190-192). Bale claims that the texts provide a balance between male and female readers, citing texts addressed to a young male as well as others that have a parental or familiar resonance (191). The visual layout of the text also suggests that a household may have enjoyed Laud as an aural text. Laud contains very little rubrication and includes little indication of stanza breaks, making the texts appear as prose. According to Bale, the layout suggests that the content is more important than the visual presentation of the book (192). Bale further claims that Laud, “only becomes organized as poetry at the moment which it is read aloud” (192). Indeed the caesural markings in “of womenhis hornys” give the reader some indication of how the poem could be read aloud. More importantly, the repletion of sounds heightens the reader’s awareness of repeated phrases, a reinforcement achieved through oral transmission.
Whether we interpret the lyric as didactic or satirical, “of womenhis hornys” participates in a medieval discourse that claims women occupy a precarious place within the virgin/whore binary and that comments on the virtues and faults of women. Lydgate composes other short lyrics on women, including “beware of doublenesse” and “a tale of a forward maymond.” In the margin above “beware of doublenesse” in Ashmole 59 Shirley has noted that the poem was written ‘for desporte and game’ (Smith, 141). Schirmer argues that Lydgate satirizes women in a “more mocking than spiteful” way, aligning the discussion of the horned headdresses with the long sleeves that Hoccleve comments on in Regement of Princes (97). Pearsall responds to Schirmer’s claim, arguing that Lydgate does not follow the form of his other satirical pieces and instead offers a “serious and considered explanation” concerning the vanity associated with these extravagant headdresses (217).
Yet considerations of “of womenhis hornys” have the potential to extend beyond the discussion of these horn-like headdresses as a symbol of vanity. Throughout his poem, Lydgate puns on multiple meanings of “horns” linking the physical design of these common headpieces with a phallic symbol, suggesting both aggressive sexuality and the reversal of anxieties about cuckoldry. During this period women were seen as extremely lascivious. Marty William and Anne Echols have noted that clerics frequently claim that women constantly attempted to seduce innocent men in order to satisfy their sexual urges (85). By associating this headdress with horns Lydgate reverses the symbol of cuckoldry. Williams and Echols also argue that depicting females as sexually insatiable allows men to justify their own behaviors (85). By placing horns on female heads, Lydgate shows that it is not only men, but women too, who face the stigma of an unfaithful spouse.
Lydgate also associates these headdresses with the horns given to beasts for defense and aggressive violence, claiming that these horns are “contrarie to ffemynyte.” This depiction raises awareness of two anxieties—woman as human-animal hybrid and woman as usurper of male dominance. As Miranda Garno Nesler has noted, women were “considered part human, part animal, wholly dangerous, wholly helpless, and always in need of masculine containment” (“Bestial Empowerment”). If women are associated with beasts, both literally and figuratively, then they threaten the human-animal divide and the social order that subjugates women—actions “contrarie to ffemynynyte.”
Calling on women to cast away their horns, Lydgate provides examples of historical and religious heroines who had no need for extravagant headpieces or other types of horns, but instead, gained fame through natural beauty and femininity. Williams and Echols note that these treatises, written mostly by celibate males, tend to “exaggerate good and bad feminine qualities placing women either in a pit of degradation or atop a pedestal of virtue” (5). All women are expected to be virginal, but also have the potential to be whores. The lyric reflects these extremes in the examples presented to the reader. Lydgate finally charges women to follow the example of the Virgin Mary who represents the ideal woman and “your hornes caſt away.” In this way, “of womenhis hornys” reiterates the invective against women and reaffirms the dangerous binary by which women were judged.
A History of "Womenhis Hornys"