'The Riddle Song' and the Shepherds' Gifts in 'Secunda Pastorum'
[Footnotes moved to the end of the article. The Riddle Song appears as an Appendix to Child 46.]
'The Riddle Song' and the Shepherds' Gifts in 'Secunda Pastorum': With a Note on the 'Tre callyd Persidis'
by Cherrell Guilfoyle
The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 8, American Literature Special Number (1978), pp. 208-219
'The Riddle Song' and the Shepherds' Gifts in Secunda Pastorum: with a Note on the 'Tre callyd Persidis'
CHERRELL GUILFOYLE
The University of Western Australia
In the second Shepherds' Play, or Secunda Pastorum, No. xIII in the Towneley Cycle of Mystery plays, there is in the closing scene a hymn, 'Hayll, comly and clene! Hayll, yong child!', in which the three shepherds offer gifts to the Child in the manger. The first shepherd says, 'Have a bob of cherys'; the second, 'a byrd have I broght / To my barne'; the third, 'I bryng the bot a ball; / Have and play the withall / And go to the tenys'.
These three gifts, in kind and in sequence, are similar to the first three gifts in 'The Riddle Song', made popular in modern times by its inclusion in the collection English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians[1]. The first verse of the song is:
I gave my love a cherry that has no stones,
I gave my love a chicken that has no bones,
I gave my love a ring that has no end,
I gave my love a baby that's no cryen.
The fourth gift, the baby, provides a further link with the Shepherds' Play, in which the hymn is addressed to the infant Christ. The Riddle appears also in the Scottish ballad Captain Wedderburn's Courtship (in other versions known as Lord Rosslyn's Daughter[2]). In the ballad the lady seeks to test, or possibly to deter, her lover by setting him riddles to solve, of which this is the first. In the first version given by Child, the Riddle appears as:
You maun get to my supper a cherry but a stane,
And you man get to my supper a capon but a bane,
And you may get a gentle bird that flies wanting the ga,
Before I lye in your bed, but I'll not lye neist the wa.
B. H. Bronson lists nineteen variants of the Riddle.[3] The earliest version which he found for which a tune was appended is from Edinburgh University MS DC. I. 69, No. 2:
My Love gave me a Cherry a Cherry without a stone
My Love gave me a Chicken a Chicken without a bone
My Love gave me a Ringe a Ringe without a rim
My Love gave me a Child Wench a Child without mourninge.
There are two main reasons for variations in works preserved by word of mouth; the more obvious, that some part of the original has been forgotten; the more significant, that the meaning of the original has been forgotten, and something substituted which makes sense of a different kind. It seems likely that the last line of the Riddle was amended in this way. The 'answer' to this line from the Appalachian parlours of the early years of this century was 'A baby when it's sleeping, there's no cry-en'. An alternative version quoted by Bronson is 'When the baby is a-getting, there's no crying'. This, with wording similar to that of the more decorous Sharp version, has one important difference; the 'cryen', 'mourninge', or other distress relates not to the baby, but to the mother. It is she who receives the gift of the child with 'no cryen', or, in the Edinburgh MS, 'without mourninge'.
In Genesis III. 16, after the Fall, God says to Eve, 'In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children'; in the Latin version, 'in dolore paries filios'. The corollary of this punishment was frequently used in medieval literature. In the twelfth-century Le Mystere d'Adam, Figura, describing the joys of Paradise in the opening scene, says:
Por engendrer n'i est hom peccheor,
Ne a l'enfanter femme n'i sent dolor.
Eve, of course, did not bring forth children without sorrow; but the Virgin Mary was celebrated as the only woman ever to do so, by virtue of her purification by the Holy Spirit in the act of impregnation.[4] Christ was therefore the only child ever to be brought forth 'sine dolore', in the sense that only in absolute purity could a child be so born.
The 'Child wench, a Child without mourninge' could, then, be the same Child as the one in Secunda Pastorum to whom the shepherds brought their gifts of cherries, a bird, and a ball. 'Wench' is usually a girl in Middle English, but in early texts is still derived from the Anglo-Saxon wencel, a child, in particular a weak and helpless child, or one in extreme infancy. In the early thirteenth-century Ormulum, written in East Midland dialect, there is the line 'zuw iss borenn an wenchell patt iss Iesu Crist' (1. 3356).
The third gift in the Riddle is a ring. 'A ring without an end' seems fairly pointless, except in so far as any ring can be said to be without a definable beginning or end. The 'answer' line in the Sharp version ('A ring when it's rolling it has no end') does nothing to make the matter clearer. (Other variations of this line given by Sharp show how 'nonsense' creeps into folklore when the context is forgotten; 'a thimble without any rim': 'a thimble without any ring'). In the Edinburgh MS, however, 'a ringe without a rim' is much more specific; and one way in which the rim of a ring becomes obscured is by being set on fire.
Of the many pagan customs which survived into Christian times, the rolling or spinning of flaming wheels is one of the most enduring. J. G. Frazer in The Golden Bough gives many instances of this rite, which pertains to sun worship. [5] The early Church was uncertain in its attitude to the use of sunworshipping rites in connexion with Christmas celebrations. There were strong official protests, and the need to eradicate traces of pagan worship informed edicts, sermons, and doctrinal writings up to and beyond the Reformation. St Augustine and Pope Leo the Great used different degrees of exhortation to Christians to celebrate 25 December because of the nativity of Christ, and not because of the birth of the new sun.[6] At the same time a process of assimilation was tolerated.[7]
The two principal pagan festivities were at the summer and winter solstices. The two great Christian feasts were in winter and in spring. Gradually the religious spirit of the old midsummer festival declined, and the pagan rites became concentrated on 'Yule-tide'. The change in the date of Christmas, from 5 January to 25 December, was made in order to 'Christianize' the Yule feasts, and to induce the romping populace, waving mistletoe and holly and careering about with boars' heads, to connect these activities with the solemn feasts of the Nativity and the Epiphany. [8]
In another way also the sun could not be eradicated from the Christian mind as a symbol of divinity, as it survived in simile and metaphor. St Augustine had used the well-known simile of the impregnation of the Virgin and the sun shining through glass; 'a solis ortus cardine', the opening line of the fifth-century hymn by Sedulius, was quoted in a number of medieval carols.[9] The description of the nativity in the apocryphal Infancy Gospel in the fourteenth-century Arundel MS goes somewhat beyond metaphor:
And the child himself shone brightly round about like the sun... I was looking upon the intense brightness of the light which was born. But the light itself, gradually withdrawing, became like a child, and in a moment became a child as children are customarily born . . . and suddenly there came forth from his eyes a great light like a brilliant flash of lightning.[10]
In Secunda Pastorum itself, the phrase 'day-starne', the Anglo-Saxon kenning for 'sun', is twice used, once for the 'false nativity' in Mak's house, and then in the closing hymn from the shepherds (11. 577, 727). The early anthropologists had two theories of the significance of sun worship at the end of the year; what Frazer calls the 'solar theory', of the sun fertilizing the land, and the 'purificatory theory', of the sun burning up and destroying all harmful influences (Golden Bough, x, 329). The winter solstice was celebrated as the birth of the sun; that is, the time when the sun's power grew again after reaching its lowest point. The sun symbolized fertility, because it made the crops grow. It also symbolized purity, because it was made of fire. To the medieval Christian, the burning bush in Exodus III 2. was a prefiguration of the Virgin Birth.[11] The ring of flame could therefore signify to pagans the two elements of the miracle of partheno-genesis, and to Christians the deeper miracle of the Nativity.
The second of the Riddle gifts, the chicken, is, as the cock, another pre- Christian symbol in the winter feast. The cock traditionally awakes the day, and it is a short step from this to heralding the birth of the sun, and later to heralding the birth of Christ.[12] Greene notes 'a crude sketch of a cock' in the margin of the MS of the carol 'Hayl, Mary ful of grace'.[13] 'Some say', says Marcellus in Hamlet, 'that ever gainst that season comes; Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, | The bird of dawning singeth all night long'.
The ballad of St Stephen and King Herod gives the legend of St Stephen, as dishbearer to King Herod, bringing on a dish from which the roasted cock or capon rises and crows 'Christus natus est'.[14] Brice refers to a MS dating from the time of Henry VI (I42I-7I) 'preserved in the British Museum' (he gives no precise reference) which also contains this story.[15]
In previous studies of the Secunda Pastorum gifts it has been suggested that the bird was a symbol of general significance for the soul; or, more specifically, for the winged soul and hence the Resurrection; or that the bird intended was the dove, symbolizing the Holy Spirit.[16] The association of the dove with the third Person of the Trinity is taken from St John's Gospel, I. 32: 'And John bare record, saying, I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him'. Linked to this symbolism of purity and innocence was the tradition that the dove has no gall, and the dove without gall appears side by side with the capon without bone in the Child balladquoted above.[17]
In the Edinburgh Riddle, the bird is 'a chicken without a bone'. In the earliest MS version found by Bronson, the ballad I haue a zong suster, the bird is 'the dowe with-outyn ony bon'.[18] In the Child ballad, there are both birds: 'a capon but a bane', and 'a gentle bird that flies wanting the ga', later identified as the dove. It is perilous to attempt dating on the basis of content alone, but it seems that the Sloane MS has a corrupt version of the Riddle, since 'a dove without a bone' is not found elsewhere. There seems to be some consensus that the Child ballad was composed much later than the Riddle, [19] and the inclusion of both symbolic birds accords with what is found elsewhere in ballads and in carols, when symbols are gathered from various sources and piled in together regardless of confusion of meaning and significance.
The cherry, of especial interest in this study because it is the one gift that is exactly the same as in Secunda Pastorum, is best known in association with Christmas from 'The Cherry Tree Carol' (Child, No. 54; Sharp, English Folk Songs, No. 15). This carol describes Joseph and Mary on the way to Bethlehem. Mary asks Joseph to pick her some cherries from a tree which they pass, and he refuses. The infant Jesus from her womb commands the tree to bow to give her fruit. In the apocryphal book known as Pseudo- Matthew, this story appears in a different form. Mary and Joseph are on the flight to Egypt, taking the infant Jesus with them. They pass a palm tree, and the infant gives the same command, from Mary's lap. In translation to a north European setting, the change from palm to cherry and from lap to womb seems to associate the cherry with divine birth. The cherry is not a winter fruit, and its original symbolism must have been part of the midsummer festival, in which all fruit represented fertility. George Ferguson points out that the cherry 'was often called the fruit of paradise', from which he deduces that it 'suggests the delights of the blessed'. [20] Its appearance in a Christmas story may be in some part due to the shifting of many of the midsummer trappings. [21] The cherry is also associated with chastity; in Ane New reir Gift to the Quene Mary (1. 219), Alexander Scott describes the Queen as 'Cherie maist chaist, cheif charbuncle and chois'.
Cantelupe and Griffith mention an interesting but inconclusive use of cherries in the frescoes of S. Maria Antiqua in Rome, converted to Christian use in the seventh century, and then trace the use of cherries in later Christian art, citing two nativity paintings from the Netherlands, Madonna and Child paintings by Crivelli and Schiavone, and one by di Giacomo where the scene is not the nativity but the Woman taken in Adultery. The stories of the cherry blooming in midwinter they trace back to pagan legends of midwinter fertility, and their conclusion is that the cherry to Christians symbolized resurrection, the sacrifice of Christ, His advent in winter, His 'sweet flesh as the boon His birth means to all mankind'. L. J. Ross followed up this enquiry, mentioning 'several saints' legends involving a cherry tree in full bloom on Christmas Day', and citing paintings of the Madonna and Child with cherries, by Lorenzetti, Verrocchio, and Titian, among others. [22] He deduces that the cherries symbolize 'paradisiac joy sacrificially relinquished', and from this that the Secunda Pastorum gift stood for the Passion and sacrificial manhood. Cutts later drew attention to Bosch's 'Die Anbetung der Kenige', in which all three gifts (the cherries, the ball, and the bird) are put into the hands of the Magi. He mentions that there is some evidence that Bosch took part in mystery plays in the closing years of the fifteenth century.
One further point emerges from study of cherries in 'Madonna and Child' paintings which indicates late adoption of this symbol in Christian art. Ross says that Verrocchio 'substituted' cherries for the 'red rose of martyrdom more commonly paired with the white'. When Titian's famous 'Madonna with the Cherries' was being transferred from canvas to wood in 1835, an underpainting was discovered in which there were no cherries, these being a later addition.
If we leave speculation aside for a moment, it seems firstly that the cherry was an ancient symbol of divine fertility, enshrined in oral but not in written tradition; and that in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance it was used in Christian legend and art in connexion with Christmas, either flowering on Christmas Eve, as in the early fifteenth-century ballad of Sir Cleges, or as an adornment in the representation of the Madonna and Child. It seems unduly complicated to assume that the cherry was connected with the Passion or Resurrection since it is connected in almost every instance cited with the nativity of Christ.
In her book on the English mystery plays, referring to the story of 'The Cherry Tree Carol', Miss Woolf states that 'how it [the cherry tree story] became transferred to the journey to Bethlehem with the new purpose of demonstrating Mary's virgin innocence is not known'. [23] The setting was not, of course, the only change; the palm of Pseudo-Matthew becomes a cherry. Child, in his annotation to 'The Cherry Tree Carol', states that the author obviously chose a fruit, unlike the palm, familiar to his English audience; but there is a further link between the two stories which may shed some more light on nativity symbolism.
In the Ludus Coventriae play on the Birth of Christ, the story is given as in 'The Cherry Tree Carol', with the addition of sudden miraculous blooming of the tree. The influence of Legenda Aurea and A Stanzaic Life of Christ on the cycle plays has long been acknowledged, but the story in these two sources is as in Pseudo-Matthew, in that the incident takes place on the flight to Egypt; and the tree is neither a palm nor a cherry but arbor perseidis. Thus there is introduced into the story the ancient figure of Perseus, the symbol in Greek legend of virgin birth.
Frazer notes that in Switzerland cherries were given to a young mother, preferably one who had just had her first child. He also notes a Christmas custom of beating girls with cherry sticks to keep them 'fresh and green', the custom of 'whipping with fresh green' (Golden Bough, I, I4I; IX, 270). By the time the cherries got into the Riddle, they may have symbolized not just the first born, but the first born and only begotten Son of God.
In the light of these speculations, it is possible to see some significance in the qualifications of the cherry and the chicken in the Riddle: 'without a stone' and 'without a bone'. The Riddle poet may have been indulging in word play. North of the border, and some way south of it in medieval times, the pronunciation and spelling of stone and bone are easily confused with stain and bane. The bone/bane confusion is well attested; bone was often, as in the Child ballad, spelt bane, and it even works the other way, for example in Henryson's Robene and Makyne: 'Robene, in dule I am so drest I That lufe wilbe my bone' (11. 53-4). Stain may be more problematical. The word is of Old French derivation, and the earliest use of the noun in the sense of'defilement' listed in OED is in 1563. However, the verb to stain, in the sense of 'defile or corrupt morally; taint with guilt or vice' was used in 1446 by Lydgate in The Nightingale (1. 287). The spelling stanei s found in early usages of the verb, and for good measure OED gives stain as an obsolete form of stone. Further, as has been seen, in the ballad Captain W edderburn's Courtship a dove appears in the riddle, 'a gentle bird that flies wanting the ga'. The idea of a bird that lives and flies without gall echoes the concept of life, or lifegiving, without sin. The sequence of the Riddle in the Edinburgh MS then provides in each line a symbol of fecundity from a divine source purified by the removal of sin or evil: the cherry without stain; the cock without bane; the ring without a rim; the child brought forth without sorrow.
The medieval Church, as has been noted above, effected some compromise with pagan customs and folklore, and many folk-songs were 'converted' for Christian use. [24] The Riddle may have been one such 'conversion', in which perhaps the highly suspect cock and ring may have aroused official condemnation and caused it to be pushed back into purely secular use, the original version (without the baby) surviving in the Child ballad and the 'converted' version being further modified and separated entirely from its religious context in what is now known as 'The Riddle Song'.
Influences other than those of authority, however, have worked on the transformation of songs and stories of religious origin. Lucy Broadwood, a pioneer in collecting and commenting on English folksongs, referred to the 'vulgar and secularised transmutation' of medieval religious allegory in carols and folk songs.[25] Brice points out that 'ballads such as "The Cherry Tree", "The Carnal and the Crane" or "The Crow and the Crane", "King Herod and the Cock", "The Miraculous Harvest", "The Lovely Lion", and 'St Stephen and Herod" were all part of one and the same story of the Infancy of Christ as told in the Apocryphal Gospels and used to such advantage by the preaching friars'.[26] The popular ballad motif of 'the setting of impossible tasks' can be traced back in some instances to works such as the Edinburgh Riddle in which there is nothing impossible if the connotation is understood. Williams gives an interesting example of this when he cites 'Scarborough Fair' as one version of a song beginning 'Tell her to make me a cambric shirt I Without any seam or needlework... Tell her to dry it on yonder thorn I Which never bare blossom since Adam was born' (English Folk-Song and Dance, p. 42).
In the 'vulgar transmutation' of the religious songs and carols which may well have been originally composed by the preaching friars, it is common for symbols from different sources to be juxtaposed at random. The version of 'The Cherry Tree Carol' in which the holly is intermingled with the cherry, and the 'cherry, holly and ivy' carol have been mentioned above. The successive variants of Captain Wedderburn's Courtship given by Bronson show a mounting proliferation of symbols, [27] and Henderson and Collinson quote a late Scottish version which they discovered, that includes holly, cock, seabird, dew, cherry, chick, and dove and ends with 'some winter fruit that in December grew'.
From this it is possible to suggest that the Edinburgh MS, dating from the mid-seventeenth century, contained a Riddle which was written at a much earlier date. Bronson is of the opinion that the Riddle 'is of proven antiquity', and Henderson and Collinson follow this by stating that the riddling motifs in Captain Wedderburn's Courtship 'go back to ancient times'. Certainly it is necessary to go back a long way to find 'wench' used in thesenseof 'infant'. Moreover, the Edinburgh Riddle can be interpreted as a consistent piece of religious allegory, and this applies to no other known version. Other versions contain some religious symbolism, for example the dove without gall, but the consistent allegory is lost. The earliest MS in which a version of the Riddle is found is Sloane 2593, with I haue a song suster. If we postulate that the uncorrupted Riddle is earlier than this, then the Edinburgh Riddle was composed not later than the early fifteenth century, which makes it roughly contemporaneous with SecundaP astorum. [28]
The ambivalence of condemnation and compromise (to encourage the people, steeped in pagan folklore, to embrace the Church, while ensuring that what they embraced was not heresy) might be argued to underlie much of the content of the Mystery plays. In any form, the Church would officially condemn the connexion of pagan beliefs and Christianity; but it was possible to present as a game, or as a joke, matters which if presented seriously or openly would be rigorously proscribed. Especially in midsummer, at the feast of Corpus Christi, when the village children hung cherry-bobs over their ears and cartwheels rolled down the hills, the temptation to synthetize would play upon the poetic imagination. It is possible therefore to see the closing hymn of Secunda Pastorum as an exercise of the medieval imagination on the one hand, and of medieval clerical caution on the other.
In his first Shepherds' Play, the Wakefield poet had written a hymn to the infant Christ in which the shepherds offered rustic, homely gifts, a 'lytyll spruse cofer', a ball, a bottle. By the time he reached the closing scene of Secunda Pastorum his view of the traditional Officium Pastorum seems to have changed radically. It is interesting to see exactly how the author revised the closing hymn. In Prima P astorum, the Child is addressed in the tradition of the northern religions, in which gods were powerful and warlike. Christ is hailed as Kyng, most of might, duke, knyght; twice as Lorde.[29] In the second version none of these terms of power is used. The hymn is written in the spirit of St Luke's Gospel, in which the weakness, helplessness, and poverty of the infant are brought out. The emphasis of the poem is on infancy, on the child just born; it celebrates the beginning, the very beginning of God on earth.
At this time the Wakefield poet might have read, or remembered, the Riddle. It might have come into his mind by some chance; for instance, if 'baculos portantes' in the Officium Pastorum had suggested to him 'baculas portantes', and reminded him of the 'cherry without a stane'.[30] But the author was himself a churchman, and even long before the Reformation there must have been limits beyond which he dared not go. The cherries he kept. The cock was generalized into a bird, the common symbol of the Holy Ghost. The ball was retained from Prima Pastorum; it too could symbolize the Trinity, but still had something of the outline and action of the ancient ring.
The gifts are introduced with a casualness calculated to disarm the reader or the listener, for they are worked with great skill into a most complex metre. 'Have a bob of cherys' is the last line of the first stanza of the hymn. The rhyme is 'merys'. The verb 'to merry', although noted in one or two early works, [31] is very rare, and it looks like a contrivance to introduce the
first Riddle gift. Incidentally, 'merry' also means a black cherry (F. merise), and there might be a double meaning hidden in the line. In the second stanza, the gift is 'a byrd have I broght I To my barne'. To this and to the cherries there is no qualification; it is as if the gifts are being made surreptitiously. The ball, as has been noted above, appears also in Prima Pastorum, as do the words 'have and play the withall'; but in the second version there is the added exhortation 'And go to the tenys'. Editors of the Wakefield plays have noted many contemporary and local references made by the author, and it has been pointed out that tennis was known in England from about 1400. [32] A side reference to fashionable or courtly matters is also found in the closing lines of Magnus H erodes, No. XVI in the Towneley Cycle: 'Bot adew! to the devyll! I can no more Franch'.
Yet 'And go to the tenys' is undoubtedly a strange way to end such a beautifully constructed poem. It could be just a 'throw away' line, but my impression of Secunda Pastorum is that nothing is thrown away. If the Wakefield author was writing with the Edinburgh Riddle in mind, the ball had replaced the ring or wheel of flame. The rings of flame also took the form of discs, with holes in the middle to which long sticks were attached. The discs were then thrown high in the air.[33] There is no evidence that the hurling of flaming discs took place in Wakefield; but some folk memory may have remained, enough to suggest the modernization to 'tenys'.
The crucial question of the date of authorship of the Riddle as it appears in the Edinburgh MS vis-a-vis Secunda Pastorum seems insoluble. In this study attention has been concentrated on the particular variants of the Riddle motifs which may shed light on the Secunda Pastorum gifts, but if all variants are taken into account one is plunged, as with all delving into folklore and pagan symbolism, into a mass of songs, ballads, anecdotes, and anthropological findings from Russia, Persia, France, Germany, and every corner of the British Isles.[34] It remains at least feasible that the Riddle had been composed and was well known when the Wakefield author was writing the highly sophisticated and intricate revision of his earlier Shepherds' Play.
NOTE ON THE 'TRE CALLYD PERSIDIS'
'Cassiodore sayth in thystore trypartyte, in hermopolyn of Thebaide ther was a tre callyd persidis, whiche is medycinal for alle sekenesses, for yf the leef or rynde of that tree ben bounde to the necke of the seke persone, it helith hym anon, and as the blessyd virgyne marye fledde with her sone, that tree bowed doun and worshypped Jhesu cryste'.
The Golden L egend( Innocents), p. 302 (Caxton/Morris)
There are two features of the legends of Perseus which bear on the present enquiry. Firstly, he was of virgin birth, Danae his mother having been impregnated by Jove in the form of a golden shower while she was imprisoned. The similarity of this incident to the sun shining through the glass of the Virgin Mary was one on which the early Church fathers had to exercise some ingenuity. Frazer has pointed out the passage in Justin Martyr's Apology in which it is explained that the devil, through listening to ancient prophecies, succeeded in imitating the future events of Scripture, and the virgin birth of Perseus is cited as one of these 'imitations'.[35]
Secondly, Perseus is reputed to have flown over Egypt on his way back from killing the Gorgon, and to have stopped for refreshment at Chemmis, where he planted a magic tree, and where a shrine was subsequently built to him.[36] This arbor perseidis, malum persicum,[37] or persea, according to the various sources, was principally a healing tree; but it also had the property, attested in 'scientific' works such as those of Theophrastus and Pliny, of bearing fruit in all seasons.[38]
Writing in the sixth century, Cassiodorus linked the tree and the Holy Family in the story he relates in Historia Ecclesiastica (Tripartita), on which the relevant passages in Legenda Aurea (see above) and A Stanzaic Life of Christ are based.[39]
In Ludus C oventriae, however, the setting and the tree were changed. It isinteresting to note that the Ludus Coventriae cycle has what Hardin Craig describes as 'a pronounced Marian trend'.[40] The divine virginity of Mary was obviously more relevant at the time of the nativity itself than during the flight to Egypt, which in any case has no Christian feast associated with it. The authors may also have shared with the author of Pseudo-Matthew, another work written 'to further the veneration of Mary as the Queen of Virgins',[41] the idea that any reference to Perseus should be excised. The palm tree, with its many biblical associations, was a logical choice for Pseudo- Matthew. The choice of the cherry is more obscure, but it is noticeable that in Ludus Coventriae the substituted cherry retains persea's property of providing fruit out of season.
There was an interesting development of persea in sixteenth-century emblem books. In examples given in Emblemata the fruit has changed; it is no longer pear-shaped, and gold or green, as in the classical texts, but is heart-shaped, as the cherry. Persea was the tree with tongue-shaped leaves and heart-shaped fruit, symbolizing the open words and secret mind of God. [42] Thus when the author of the Ludus Coventriae 'Birth of Christ' sought an acceptable alternative to the pagan magic tree, he may have intended to keep the symbolism which linked it to divine and virgin birth, and therefore did not use the palm of Pseudo-Matthew but a tree already symbolizing parthenogenesis in a tradition no doubt pagan, but deep in the folklore of the country. How deep or how distant it is impossible to say. The cherry is not indigenous to England, nor to western Europe according to OED, in which it is pointed out that there is no Celtic nor Teutonic word for it. The English word comes from the Greek kerasos, supposedly named after a town in Pontus, although there may be some connexion with keras (horn).
How kerasos travelled from the Levant across Europe, and what legends were associated with it, is not known, and is certainly not documented as was persea, in Theophrastus, Pliny, Cassiodorus, Isidore, and Jacobus de Voragine, to mention only those I have managed to trace. However, it looks as if the cherry 'took over' in the story first found in Cassiodorus at about the time of the writing of the Mystery cycles in England. The incident is pictured in the Tres Riches Heures du duc de Berry (late fourteenth century), in which the tree looks something like a palm, with frond-like leaves and gold or brown fruit, but certainly not like a cherry. It seems quite possible that the substitution was the work of the author of Ludus Coventriaae nd that, following the representation of the play, the popular version in 'The Cherry Tree Carol' was composed. [43]
Footnotes:
1 Collected by Cecil J. Sharp, edited by Maud Karpeles (Oxford, 1932), No. 144.
2 In The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, edited by Francis James Child (New York, 1957), No. 46.
3. Bertrand Harris Bronson, The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, 4 vols (Princeton, 1959-72). I, (I959), 376.
4. Compare The Early English Carols, edited by Richard Leighton Greene (Oxford, I935), No. 26 (p. 19) 'Withouth peyne other loure | Mary bore oure Sauyoure'; No. 151 (p. 205) 'Thou hast born chield without doloure, [ And so noon other woman can'.
5. Third edition, 12 vols (London 1907-15), x (1913), 161, I90; note also Kirchmeyer, Regnum Papisticum, translated as The Popish Kingdome by Barnabe Googe, folio 54: the 'rotten wheele... being all with fire light... resembling much the Sunne'.
6. Augustine, Sermon I90. I; Leo, Sermon 22, quoted by Frazer (v, 305).
7. Compare Keith Feiling, A History of England (London, I950), p. 44; 'the early Church lived by compromising with the morals of a primitive people... the mental air was full of sun-worship'.
8. See Golden Bough, v, 305; also E. K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage (Oxford, 1903), p. 238, referring to 25 December as a date 'in the very heart of the pagan rejoicings and upon the actual day hitherto sacred to Sol Invictus', and (p. 330) to the January Kalends as 'the one feast in the year in which paganism made its most startling and persistent recoil upon Christianity'.
9. Compare Greene, Early English Carols, Nos. 21, 31, 52, I22.
10. Arundel MS, British Library 404, translated by M. R. James in Latin Infancy Gospels (Cambridge, 1927).
11. Compare A. C. Cawley, The Wakefield Pageants i n the Towneley Cycle (Manchester, 1959), p. 203, and Prima Pastorum, 11. 359-68.
12. Compare Prudentius, Hymnus adgalli cantum: 'Alex diei nuntius I lucem propinquam praecinit; inos excitator mentium I iam Christus ad vitam vocat'.
13. A Selection of English Carols, edited by Richard Leighton Greene (Oxford, 1932), p. 13.
14. The Oxford Book of Ballads, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch (Oxford, 1910), p. 113.
15. Douglas Brice, The Folk Carol of England (London, 1967), p. 53.
16. E. B. Cantelupe and R. Griffith, 'The Gifts of the Shepherds in the Wakefield Secunda Pastorum: An Iconological Interpretation', Medieval Studies, 28 (1966), 328-35; J. P. Cutts, 'The Shepherds' Gifts in The Second Shepherds' Play and Bosch's "Adoration of the Magi" ', Comparative D rama, 4 (1970-71), 120-24.
17. Compare Aelfric's Homily DominicaX Post Pentecosten1, . 249: 'Culfre is sw6ie bylewit, and eall butan geallan'; also A Stanzaic Life of Christ, 11. 9699 and 9710. Bronson (p. 364) quotes a version of the Child ballad from Scotland: 'an sin' the flood o' Noah I The doo she has nae ga''.
18. Sloane MS 2593, dated mid-fifteenth century; see also Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuriese, dited by Rossell Hope Robbins (Oxford, 1952), No. 45.
19. Compare Bronson; and H. Henderson and F. Collinson, 'New Child Ballad Variants from Oral Tradition', Scottish Studies, 9 (1965), 1-33 (pp. 14-17).
20. Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York, 1961), p. 34.
21 Greene, Selection, p . 210, cites a carol 'Cherry, holly and ivy'. Brice (p. 46) gives a version of 'The Cherry Tree Carol' in which verses about holly are intermingled.
22 'Symbol and Structure in the Secunda Pastorum', Comparative Drama, I (I967-8), I22-43.
23. Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (London, 1972), p. 177.
24. See Greene, Early English Carols, p. cxxiii and following.
25. See Iolo A. Williams, English Folk-Song and Dance (London, 1935), p. 114.
26. Folk Carol, p. 53.
27. Bronson, I, 362-75.
28. See Crawley, The Wakefield Pageants, p. xxxi: 'the weight of the evidence is therefore in favour of the years 1400-I450'. Although the order of composition of the Wakefield plays is not known, Secunda Pastorum is usually assumed to be late in the sequence, because the technical skill of the writing is more assured and more complex than that of the other plays. A. W. Pollard estimates the date of the Wakefield MS as c. 1460, and of the composition of the plays as c. 1410.
29. See Feiling, A History of England, p. 35; he points out that the warlike ethic and 'heroic temper' of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes was reflected in some aspects of Christian mythology, for example in the Harrowing of Hell, a story introduced in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, and a favourite theme of medieval poets.
30. See Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval C hurch, 2 vols (Oxford, I933), II, 17, quoting a version of the Rouen OfficiumP astorum.
31. OED: myr3od, c. o000; murgeth, 1310.
32. See Gower, In Praise of Peace (I399), 11. 295-6: 'Of the Tenetz to winne or lese a chace J May no lif wite er that the bal be ronne'.
33. Golden Bough, x, 116, I6I. The idea was apparently to imitate the passage of the sun across the sky. Frazer cites ancient customs still current at that time (1913) in central Europe.
34 See the introduction to Captain Wedderburn's C ourtship, Child, pp. 416-I9.
35 Golden Bough, v, 302, citing the Apology, 1.54. Note also Apology, 1.22: 'And if we even affirm that He was born of a virgin, accept this in common with what you accept of Perseus' (The Anti-Nicene Fathers, edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, o0 vols (Edinburgh, I885), I, 170.)
36 Herodotus, II. 91: Isidore, Etymologiarum, xvII. vii.
37 Malum persicum is strictly the peach tree, but the confusion between this and persea is of long standing: see Pliny, Historia Naturalis, xv.xiii, and reference in Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schone, Emblemata (Stuttgart, 1967), col. 236.
38 Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants, Iv.2; Pliny, xIII. 50.
39 Cassiodorus Liber, vi.c.xlii (Migne, Patrologia Latina, LXIX, I058); Stanzaic Life, 11. 3325 and following.
40. English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1955), p. 246.
41 E. Hennecke, New TestamentA pocryphae, dited by W. Schneemelcher (London, I963), p. 406.
42 Emblemata, col. 236.
43 I gratefully acknowledge the valuable comments on this article made by Professor G. M. Jones.