The poem’s frame of reference is ambiguous; it could be a sacred or a profane work.63 The “birds in the woods, fish in the river” formula was both a secular and a religious topos in the Middle Ages. It has an extensive tradition in Christian writing, beginning in Genesis 1:20, when both birds and fish were created on the fifth day, and continuing in medieval religious literature. The placement of the birds and fish in their natural habitats refers to the cosmic hierarchy created by God, from which man is alienated due to original sin. (Passus 11 of the B-text of Piers Plowman, to cite one example, offers an extended meditation on this topos.) Further, the language of the poem appears in other lyrics of the later Middle Ages, such as a lullaby that survives in autonomous copies and in sermons.64 In the religious or secular context, the final line of the poem is ambiguous. In one reading, the speaker feels sorrow on account of Christ, who was the “best of bone and blood,” and of the suffering of his Passion: “I walk with much sorrow that I feel for the best of bone and blood.” (If secular, “the best of bone and blood” can equally describe the beloved.) Alternately, the speaker himself or herself is the “best (or beast) of bone and blood”—the highest order of being in God’s earthly creation—who nonetheless feels sorrow: “I walk with much sorrow despite being the best/a beast of bone and blood.” Even the musical accompaniment to “Fowls in the Frith,” which some readers have believed to be liturgical, might have been used for secular purposes.65
The poem’s topoi locate it within a network of lyric forms while also pointing to the expansiveness of lyric practice. They demonstrate how this particular form creates mobile relations rather than totalizing and isolating the lyric text. Like the rest of the poem, the opening topos works across sacred and secular meanings. Birdsong frequently opens love lyrics, especially in a springtime setting, or reverdie. This season excites carnal love but can also heighten a rejected lover’s feelings of dissatisfaction. In a secular reading of the poem, the birds and the fish are in their proper places in nature, enjoying the satisfaction of their carnal desires, while the speaker is out of place, experiencing sorrow on account of the “best” woman “of bone and blood.” The poem’s economical language does not reveal whether the cause of the speaker’s sorrow is Christ or a woman.
Further, “Fowls in the Frith” uses its topoi, the rhetorical common places, to thematize place as a poetic and metaphysical construct. The first two lines locate animals in their habitats with isocolons that hinge on the word “in.” The preposition replaces the verb in these lines, substituting location for action, and evokes a classical definition of place that was well known in the Middle Ages. In the Physics, Aristotle describes eight different uses of “in”: the part in the whole, the species in the genus, and so forth. The two opening lines of “Fowls in the Frith” demonstrate Aristotle’s final use of “in,” when “something is contained in a vessel, and, in general, in a place.”66 These lines thus thematize place by using this preposition in lieu of a verb. They suggest stasis but also motion, evoking the micromovements of each animal within its habitat. And indeed, Aristotle conceives place and motion as interdependent concepts: “[I]t would never occur to us to make place a topic for investigation if there were no such thing as change of place. That is the main reason that we think that even the heavens are in place—because they are in constant motion. This kind of change may be either movement or increase and decrease.”67 Aristotle here identifies two kinds of motion, what he calls “movement,” or locomotion, and “increase and decrease,” or change. Place itself, however, is motionless; it is “the limit of the containing body, [where] the container makes contact with what it contains.” Further, the “contents” of such a container must be “a body which is capable of movement.”68 In other words, it is the potentiality of motion that defines the boundary of place, and of form.69 The first two lines of “Fowls in the Frith” announce this theme, locating mobile entities (birds, fish) in their respective places.
Following the assertion of place and in-place-ness of the first two lines of “Fowls in the Frith,” we have an image of Aristotle’s second kind of motion, change: “And I mon waxe wod.” The verb “waxen,” to grow, alludes to an affective state, which the next line connects to Aristotle’s first kind of motion, locomotion: “Mulch sorw I walke with.” The alliteration of “waxe” and “walke” and the parallel affective terms “wod” and “sorwe” suggest a relationship between the two kinds of motion, change and locomotion, that makes explicit the potential mobility of the birds and fishes invoked in the first two lines. Change and locomotion enter the poem concurrent with its affective content: “I mon waxe wod.” As Curtius points out, the topics of medieval poetry, even though they reflect “timeless” emotional states and human relationships, are also figures of change: they generate more topoi, and they describe changes in affect.70 In other words, this poem’s concern with motion is multiply valenced: rhetorical, affective, and hermeneutic.
We have seen how the poem’s rhetoric thematizes tactics as situational movements, both human and poetic, across determinate structures (natural, poetic, and metaphysical). But what of this lyric as an object of practice? We have already noted that its musical accompaniment is similarly tactical, with both secular and religious potential. Further, the material form of the lyric is itself displaced in its unique manuscript witness, Oxford, Bodleian MS Douce 139. Largely a collection of thirteenth-century legal documents relating to the town of Coventry, the codex also includes copies of a reissue of the Magna Carta from 1253 and a French verse rendition of the Statute of Gloucester from 1278. “Fowls in the Frith” and its music appear on folio 5r. The poem shares a hand, which appears nowhere else in the manuscript, with the Anglo-French lyric “Ay queer ay un maus,” also set to music.71 These lyrics, copied around 1270, were inserted in the manuscript as quire endpapers after the rest of its contents were compiled. The lyric copies were essentially scrap paper used to protect the more valuable legal material within the book.
In other words, not only does the text of “Fowls in the Frith” thematize displacement, the material text of the poem is itself displaced from a literary context. The vernacular songs have been located in a context of documentary place, among the legal records of an English town. MS Douce 139 owes its existence to an increasing emphasis on the documentary construction of place (in this case, Coventry) arising from the bureaucratic expansion of thirteenth-century England. As the presence of “Fowls in the Frith” shows, the lyrics of medieval England rely on such literary and textual structures but navigate them tactically. This navigation is at once “internal,” within the form and rhetoric of the poem, and “external,” in the material and performative contexts of its transmission. Yet tactical practice inherently belies the distinction between interiors and exteriors, as the mobility of the one displaces and reshapes the other.
Most vernacular texts of later medieval England are influenced by its particular cultures of textual production and performance. As the example of “Fowls in the Frith” demonstrates, certain formal features of the lyric—its brevity, its rhetoric of the commonplace—make it more amenable to tactical inclusion among other texts and, indeed, to the implicit theorization of the tactical. This conjunction of forms and practices unites these short poems as a genre specific to the culture of later medieval England. How, then, can we understand the relationship between what I am calling the medieval English lyric and the transhistorically defined literary genre of “lyric”? To address this question, I briefly examine the modern emergence of theories of the lyric and of the definition of the Middle English lyric corpus.
Medieval English Lyrics and “the Lyric”
Middle English lyrics have entered modern literary criticism through the highly mediated apparatus of modern genre making, which has been informed as much by post-Romantic aesthetic expectations of lyric poetry as by the philological methods central to medieval studies. Thus, it is worth considering what is at stake in using the word “lyric” to describe this corpus and to what extent the integration
