In Middle English, or rather beginning with Old English and coming down to about 1500, including all works listed by J. E. Wells in his Manual of the Writings in Middle English, there are approximately 553 dream references. By dream references are meant actual dreams or remarks made about dreams which throw light on the attitude of the time toward dreams. Repeated references to the same dream are counted as a single reference. Of these references, 59 occur in Old English and 494 in Middle English. Old Norse is even richer than Middle English in dream references, no less than 530 being found. The large number of dream references in Old Norse is all the more significant in view of the smaller bulk of Old Norse literature in comparison with Middle English.

Old English ersc belongs to OE. erian, Goth. arjan, Old Norse erja, O. Saxon erian, OHG. erren “to plough”; Lithuanian árti “to plough,” Old Slavonic orjǫ, Lat. aro, Middle Irish airim, Greek áρόω “I plough,” a dissyllabic basis, as may be seen by Greek áρo-τρoν Armenian araur (< Idgc. ar∂tro-) (and Lat. arātrum, which probably stands for arătrum), “plough” and by the accent in Lithuanian árti “to plough” and árklas “plough.”

We have two manuscripts of The Owl and the Nightingale. Of these the earlier and more valuable, known as Cotton Caligula A.IX (C), is in the British Museum. In this the Owl is immediately preceded by a chronicle in French prose which ends thus: Apres le mort cestu rei Johan, si regna sun fiz Henry, ‘After the death of King John his son Henry became king.’ It would appear, therefore, that the Owl was copied into this volume not long after the coronation of Henry the Third, October 28th, 1216. The other manuscript, Jesus College Oxford 29 (J), is in the Bodleian Library. In Anglia, xxx, 222, Miss Anna C. Paues reports the following opinion of Mr. E. W. B. Nicholson, Bodley's Librarian, concerning the portion of J which contains our poem:

From f. 217 to the end of the volume is apparently all in one hand, and was certainly written about the same time. It contains a history of Tobias which mentions the then Prior of St. Mary Kenilworth (Gwilleyme): this fixes the date of composition at 1276–9, and I believe that to be approximately the date of the writing.

My first introduction to the mediæval story of King Horn came through reading in the Year Book 1914–1924, published by the Viking Club of London, a review of Dr. Henry Goddard Leach's Angevin Britain and Scandinavia. The reviewer in discussing the story of Horn referred to the difficulty of fixing the location of “Suddene” where the action of the story had its beginning and end, and suggested that it may have been situated in South Wales. My first real acquaintance with the Horn story, however, as well as the problems with which it is involved, came through reading the scholarly essay, “The Story of Horn and Rimenhild,” by Professor William Henry Schofield.

The “Anonymous Riming Chronicle” has long been known through the text printed by Ritson from B.M. MS. Royal 12. C. xii. The first serious attempt to study the sources of this poem and establish the relationships of the several MSS. was made by R. Sternberg, in two papers in Englische Studien XVIII, 1 ff. and 356 ff. In the first of these papers, Sternberg presents a scheme of MS. relations based upon the first and last fifty lines of the text as contained in five MSS. In the second paper he examines the sources of the Chronicle and shows that it depended upon Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle with supplementary use of William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum.

One of the allegorical motifs in the Vision of Piers Plowman which has often been specially noted on account of its boldness and picturesqueness is the description of Christ jousting against Satan upon the Cross clad in armor and embodying the chivalric virtues.

Study of the Gawain-poet in recent years has greatly increased: and with increase it has also grown more intelligent and appreciative. In 1922 there appeared the late Professor Emerson's ‘Notes on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (JEGPh. XXI) and ‘Some Notes on the Pearl’ (PMLA. XXXVII), two suggestive and penetrating studies which anticipated many of the emendations and notes of the edition that was to follow three years later. In 1925 there appeared what scholars had long been hoping for, a carefully edited text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This edition, the work of two British scholars, Professors Tolkien and Gordon, provides the reader with good notes and a competent working glossary. The notes, however, it must be said, are sometimes too brief in their discussion and give too little recognition to the work of previous annotators, where credit was justly due. Professor J. R. Hulbert's review of the new edition, which appeared later in the same year (Mod. Phil. XXIII. 246–249), though brief, contains a number of comments which succeeding scholars must take into account. In 1927 Professor Emerson published a further study of the Pearl (PMLA. XLII), and more important for our purpose, his review of the new edition (JEGPh. XXVI) which threw further light on many a textual crux and clarified some details of the story. Nor have studies of Sir Gawain been confined to criticism of the text. Fräulein von Schaubert (Engl. Stud. LVII), has postulated an English rather than a French origin for the poem, thus taking issue with the views of Kittredge. Also translations of the poem have been published by S. O. Andrew and T. H. Banks which keep the alliterative measure of the long line and endeavor not unsuccessfully to maintain the bob and wheel arrangement at the stanza's end.

In the fourteenth century all good Englishmen were singers. How large a part music played in the life of the time is apparent in Chaucer, who, as Burney remarks, ‘never loses an opportunity of describing or alluding to its general use, and of bestowing it as an accomplishment upon the pilgrims, heroes, and heroines of his several poems.’ The carved figures in the minstrels' gallery at Exeter Cathedral and the Angel Choir of Lincoln are lasting memorials to the universal popularity of music in that day. While the cleric devoted himself to the music that lent beauty to the services of the church, the layman delighted in the music of the banquet, the battle, and the chase. Edward III. himself kept a band of household minstrels that included ‘trompeters, cytelers, pypers, tabrete, mabrers, clarions, fedelers, wayghtes.’ Le Art de Venerie, written by Twici, huntsman to Edward II., reveals a highly developed hunting music, and the martial music is mentioned by Chaucer in the Knight's Tale (A. 2511–12):

Pypes, trompes, nakers, clariounes,

That in the bataille blowen blody sounes.

Born into such a world as this, the poet of Pearl and Sir Gawain bore the deep impress of the popular taste. His own taste was of wide compass, and included an appreciation of instrumental and vocal, secular and ecclesiastical music.

The indebtedness of Chaucer's Legend of Philomela to the Ovide Moralisé for details not to be found in the Metamorphoses was established more than a decade ago by Professor Lowes. Observing, further, in the Legend of Ariadne and in the short account of her abandonment by Theseus in the Hous of Fame (405–426) the strong resemblances to Machaut's résumé of Theseus' “fals jape” in the Jugement dou Roy de Navarre, Lowes suggested that these likenesses might also be due, wholly or in part, to a common use of Machaut's favorite source, the Ovide Moralisé, although as the pertinent part of the text of the Ovide Moralisé was still unpublished, he was unable to verify his conjecture. Recently Professor Shannon, without examining the history of Ariadne in the French version of the Metamorphoses, has somewhat rashly rejected Professor Lowes's theory, and declared that Boccaccio's De Genealogia Deorum is the only source aside from Ovid himself which Chaucer used for his stories of the heroine. In the course of a general examination of the influence upon Chaucer of the Ovide Moralisé —made upon de Boer's edition and upon a manuscript of the complete text—I have found that Lowes's hypothesis is sound, while the instances of the impress of Boccaccio's mythology cited by Shannon appear uniformly weak.

The purpose of this paper is not to establish definite sources for Chaucer's Monk's Tale but to consider it as a representative of a general mediæval type. Professor Lounsbury declared that the Monk's Tale belonged to a “species of composition to which the men of Chaucer's age were exceedingly addicted.” In the Canterbury Tales, he continues, “the Monk's tale is introduced as a specimen of these collections of stories, and largely and perhaps entirely for the sake of satirizing, or at least of censuring, the taste that created and enjoyed them.” “In the Middle Ages,” writes Mr. J. E. Wells, “it was not at all uncommon to make collections of a single general type.…. These collections were.… of an encyclopædic character.” So Mr. E. Greenlaw: “It [the Monk's Tale] is.… an example of the many collections of tales having a didactic purpose which were characteristic of mediævalism.”

All the accepted authorities agree in stating first, that William Dunbar was not wholehearted in his devotion to Chaucer, but followed him “at a distance and, perhaps, with a divided affection” for some other school of poetry; and secondly, that the other influence which divided his affection was that of French poets such as Alain Chartier, Charles of Orleans, and above all Villon.

In a series of papers published now a number of years ago I endeavored to define the relation of the fable to kindred forms, proposed a classification based on the collection of Marie de France, traced certain developments in the history of the rimed fable in England, and followed out the concept of the fable as poetry in English criticism.