Hi! You called for observations and ideas on this intriguing poem. Here are some more!
"In durance", so you suggest, means "continually". Surely, in the context, the most likely meaning of "durance" is "Forced confinement, imprisonment; constraint" (OED, 5).
I do not follow your explanation of Tom’s arithmetic. Is this how it goes? "Fifteen" is recorded by the OED in the now obsolete sense of "fifteenth". Line 3 of verse 2 ("& of forty bin three times fifteen") therefore indicates "three fifteenths of forty", which is eight. Thus Tom was securely locked up in prison ("in durance soundlie caged") for eight years. The first two lines are more puzzling. Nigel offers one interesting idea. I wonder if a simpler explanation is available, however - namely, that this is not meant to make sense. The speaker offers himself as a madman, after all. Perhaps the lines should be paraphrased - crazily - like this: "Of the past thirty years I have been mad for forty, and for eight years of those forty I was securely locked up in prison".
"Under twenty-one he would not have money available to him and if older one supposes he would have been wiser." - You imply here and elsewhere that Tom at twenty-one inherited money. I see no evidence for this. Also, if Tom were in fact entitled to such an inheritance, it is not necessary to assume that he must have inherited it at twenty-one. A later age could well have been stipulated in any (supposed) will.
While "stews" were brothels, the word is derived from the use (in earlier times as, apparently, more recently) of heated bath-houses for immoral purposes. So, though an oblique allusion in "pottage" to brothels cannot be absolutely ruled out, it seems to me unlikely. Much more likely is the presence mentioned by Graves of an obscene allusion in "cockle", so that "with a thing thus tall" is a phallic brag, "thing" being a euphemism continuously alive in the language from the middle ages. (Graves also refers to "cockle-bread" as an aphrodisiac", but though the OED suggests a potentially obscene allusion, both derivation and sense remain unclear.)
More literally, as you note, "cockles" were weeds (as in Job’s "Let thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley" - 31.40.8). Beggars were not, of course, a merely urban phenomenon, as they tend to be today, at least in the West; and town and country were more closely and visibly linked in the period than they have ever been since. That Tom should have had to eat (or should have feigned to have eaten) a pottage made of weeds would have been a clear mark both of his poverty and of his outcast state.
I suggest that "Conquest" here refers to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. This date was commonly used in a variety of administrative settings to place events, such as the reigns of monarchs, and, more vaguely, to refer to a time remote enough to suggest long duration. (An illustrative, though later and wittily hyperbolical, analogy is Andrew Marvell’s "I would / Love you ten years before the Flood" in "To His Coy Mistress".) The expressions "time out of mind" and "since time immemorial" were originally of the same sort but came to be used formally by English lawyers to exclude the bringing of actions for wrongs committed in the distant past. By the Statute of Westminster of 1275, this time was fixed as falling before the reign of Richard I, i.e. before 1189. So, perhaps these lines mean no more than this: "I slept through the long ages before the Norman Conquest and have been awake ever since."
The fourth verse is undoubtedly baffling. While I cannot say I understand it as a whole, I have one or two thoughts to offer. You suggest that "Sowce=souse meant to splash". The difficulty I have with this is that "souse" (or "sowce") does not seem to have been used as a past participle, as your reading requires. The past participle in all its senses is always "soused" (or a cognate spelling). To read the word as you do, I think you have to assume a copyist’s error, but from the available texts there seems to be no reason to make this assumption, especially as simpler interpretations are to hand. One is Graves’s suggestion that "sowce" means "sow’s", conventions in the use of apostrophes not having been standardised at the time of the manuscript under discussion. On this reading the line means "When I have shaved my beard short, my face being as hairy as a sow’s etc.". Sows, so Graves implies, are notably hairy. I propose an alternative reading, however, one more relevant to the following lines with their apparent references to drinking and drunkenness. This, based on a hint in the OED, takes the use of sow in "sowce face" ("sow’s face") as having the force it does in these quotations, which the OED lists under "sow" (i.e. female pig): "Some sowe dronke, swalowing meate without measure, Some maudlayne dronke, mourning loudly and hye" from 1509 and, from 1522, "Yet shal ye find mo yt drink themself sow drunk of pride to be called good felowes, than for luste of the drink self." If this is right, then the line means, "When I have shaved close the beard on my drunkard’s face".
I do not readily see the next two lines as referring to a debtor’s prison and to the task of pounding oakum. (One of my grandfathers, who died in his late eighties over forty years ago now, had been the labour-master in a poor house in the south of England till the early 1930s, when the system was overhauled. He was an acute observer of human beings and had the gift of vivid speech. I well remember his accounts of his experiences, including the supervision of male vagrants in the beating of oakum, a product for which, as late as his adult years, there was still a market.) I speculate, therefore that "oaken inne" means an oak wood (Graves suggests an oak tree), that to "pound" means to shut up or enclose (i.e. to impound), that "skin" is elliptical for the skin-bottle in which Tom keeps his liquor, a possession so valuable he refers to it as a garment made of gold cloth, "guilt" being an archaic spelling of "gilt". I feel uneasy about your suggestion that "guilt apparrell" is French for "apparent guilt".
The moon’s shepherd was surely Endymion of whom Selene, the moon goddess, was enamoured. The story was well-known in the period, Lyly, for instance, having written a play, "Endimion" (1591), based on the story, and Michael Drayton a narrative poem, "Endimion and Phœbe" (1595).
I do not understand "the first doth horne the star of morne". "To horn" is to make a cuckold of, and, as you say, Aphrodite (Venus) certainly cuckolded her husband, Hephaestus, by lying with Ares (Mars). But the star of morn (not, surely, "stars" as posted) is Phosphor, the light-bearer (the planet Venus as seen at dawn, which, in the evening sky, becomes Hesper.) Though in a footnote Graves avers that "the Moon cuckolds Lucifer", who is the cuckold here, and who the cuckolder ("the first… and the next")?
On a wider aspect of the topic, to assume that the poem as it has come down to us is a set of riddles intended to puzzle and amuse its hearers is to assume something about the social and cultural context in which it flourished (that is, beyond the sanitising framework of anthologies). Graves proposes that its origins lie with the "Abraham-men", genuine and also sham beggars and lunatics, who wandered about England in the late sixteenth century living (or preying) upon casual charity. They seem to have constituted a recognisable subculture, with its own styles of dress (or undress), its characteristic dodges and special "turns", of which this poem is perhaps an instance. That such a subculture existed is evidenced not just by many contemporary prose accounts but also by Shakespeare’s introduction of the figure of Poor Tom into "King Lear", a figure he presumably thought would be recognised by audiences in 1604-5, more than three decades after the passing in 1572 of an act imposing severe penalties (including, after a third offence, the death penalty) on such vagabondage. The existence of the various companion pieces to the poem, which Graves discusses, makes the same point. It is no doubt likely that there is a deliberate element of puzzle-making here; but given the kinds of audience - on the street or lane but also in the study and the theatre - to which this and other such poems might be regarded as having been addressed, and given, too, the underlying economic purpose of such "turns" in presenting a convincing impression of madness, is it is not just as likely that some lines are in fact meant to be nonsense? Indeed, one might suppose that, to the degree that they approach towards, without quite attaining, a cunning kind of sense, they achieve that end to even greater effect.
As I said in an earlier message, "Good luck"!
Clive Watkins
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