[ewrgall]

Tom O' Bedlam--a mad song

The following post has been edited many times as I worked through the meanings of "Tom O' Bedlam". (Many thanks to Clive Watkins for his useful comments.) Most of the comments that follow it were about earlier postings and not this current version. Please bear that in mind as you read through the thread.

There are many versions of this anonymous song from the very early seventeenth century. It is a regular anthology piece but what interests me is that no one seems to quite understand what this mad song actually is. Basically, it is a song of little riddles. The madman is speaking quite clearly--if you solve his riddles.

The basic story it tells is a proverbial one--a young man at twentyone comes into his majority, proceeds to a whorehouse, falls in love with a whore, and during a year long spree she takes him for everything he has got. He is so obsessed that he is locked up as a madman. Eventually he is released from Bedlam to wander the streets a mad beggar.

The following is taken from Thomas Dekker's "The Honest Whore, part I". Sweeper (an attendent at a madhouse) and the Duke are discussing the occupants of the madhouse.
Duke:Few gentlemen or Courtiers here, ha?
Sweeper:Oh yes! Abundance, aboundance! Lands no sooner fall into their hands, but straight they runne out of their wits! Citizens sons and heires are free of the [mad]house by their father's copy. Farmers sons come hither like geese (in flocks), when they have sold all their corn fields, here they sit and pick the straws.

The version that I will use is the oldest known version from "Giles Earle his booke" (1615). This was a collection of manuscript songs and verses that Giles Earle had collected over a period of years. I take it from "Loving Mad Tom" an essay by Robert Graves from his book called THE COMMON ASPHODEL.

Verse 1
From the hag and hungry Goblin,
that into raggs would rend yee,
and the spirit that stand's by the naked man,
in the booke of moons defend yee
Madness and lunacy were two distinct things--the former caused by witches and evil spirits and the latter by the full moon. "That into rags would rend thee" means to drive you into proverty, having no clothing left but rags.The "book of moons" refers not to an actual book but to the full moon. The full moon contains all partial moons within itself just as a book contains all its chapters. (To refer to the full moon as the "book of moons" is a very Shakespearean type usage--I think Shakespeare wrote this song.) The naked (defenseless) man was susceptible to the spirit that caused lunar madness. Other were not bothered by this malady. Witches and goblins could attack anyone.
That of your five sounde senses
you never be forsaken
Nor travel from your selves with Tom
abroad to beg your bacon
When funds were short or Bedlam too crowded, some of the mad were released to wander the streets as beggers (sometimes still wearing their chains).
Chorus: while I doe sing any food, any feeding,
feedinge---drink or clothing:
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
poore Tom will injure nothing.
Self-explanatory.

Verse 2
Of thirty bare yeares have I
twice twenty bin enraged,
and of forty bin three tymes fifteen
In durance soundlie caged,
Bare=barely, only. "Twice twenty" is a hyperbolic phrase, an intensifer and means hugely, greatly or totally. The first two lines say--Only thirty years old I have been totally enraged (driven totally mad).
The next line is different--it is simple arithmetic. Fifteen=one fifteenth. Three times fifteen=3x1/15=3/15=1/5 or one fifth. One fifth of forty equals 8.
The stanza says "Of only thirty years of age, I have been driven totally mad and for eight years been continually locked up in Bedlam." Tom is now 30 years old and has been released to wander the streets as a harmless mad beggar. Being thirty years old that means he was locked up at the age of twenty two. The tale of the young rake who turns twenty one, goes "whore mad" and within a year spends all his money was a proverbial one.
On the lordlie loftes of Bedlam
with stubble softe and dainty,
brave braceletts strong, sweet whips ding dong
with wholesome hunger plenty,
and nowe I sing &c.
Self-explanatory. Bedlam had two floors. The upper level was where the madest of the mad were kept. Their only bedding was straw.

Verse 3
With a thought I tooke for Maudline
and a cruse of cockle pottage
with a thing thus tall, sky bless you all:
I befell into this dotage.
Here we learn the reason why Tom is mad. Maudlin was short for Mary Magdalene or prostitute and pottage was a vegetable stew. Cockles were weeds. Stews were what houses of prostitution were called. Cruse=bowl. To satisfy his appetite Tom went looking for a whore. He had a "bowl of cockle pottage" at a "stew". Tall=of a handsome appearance. "Sky bless you all" seems to be the word "skeblous-u-al", a word with a Scottish root meaning "rascally, evil, dispised." Scottish things were something of a vogue when James I took the throne. The whole phrase "with a thing thus tall, skeblousual" is making a sarcastic comparison between the whore's outward desirability and her inward vile nature. Tom went mad over a worthless whore. Dotage has a double meaning. Tom dotes on his whore but dotage also meant mental incompetence.
There is a good possibility that "Thus tall" is actually a phonetic pronounciation of a 16th century Scottish word that I do not recognize.
I slept not since the Conquest
till then I never waked,
Till the rogysh boy of love where I lay
mee found and strip't me naked.
and now I sing &c.
Tom falls in love with his whore and is driven whore mad. Conquest=Tom's conquest by love. Tom cannot sleep i.e. cannot put his love to rest, give it up.----Till then I never waked=this was Tom's first experience with love. The passions of love had never before been woken in him till he met his whore. He was an innocent.----The roguish boy of love=Cupid---stripped me naked=made me defenseless.

Verse 4
When I short have shorne my sowce face
and swigg'd my horny barrel,
In an oaken Inne do I pound my skin
as a suite of guilt apparell.
Basically this says that Tom spends all his money on his whore (cuts his own beard short--we still used the expression "clipped" to mean flimflammed or robbed). Tom, by his extravagence, ruins himself. Sowce=sow's. Short shorn my pig's face--Tom has wasted the money that was to give him his start in the world, like a pig gobbling it up as quickly as possible. Horny barrel=Tom has gotten drunk on his whore--his infatuation and lack of judgment are likened to drunkenness. He is arrested for debts and sadly finds himself in "an oaken Inne"=Stocks. Prisoners for short term were kept in stocks before being taken to court or sent to prison. "Pound my skin"=Pound is short for "compound" which meant to make arrangements to settle debts. Tom's body will have to settle the debts he can't pay. He will go to prison till he pays his debts. "A (law)suite of gilt(guilt) apparrell(ment)" describes the legal condition that will send him to prison. Guilte apparrellment (After the Norman conquest French was the language of the law in England. Queen Elizabeth's reign was a transition period between French and English.) meant "obvious guilt". Back then creditors could file suit against debtors showing evidence of money owed and have the debtors immediately arrested and thrown into prison. But Tom is also obviously mad. Instead of prison he will be sent to Badlam.
The moon's my constant mistresse
and the lowlie owle my marrowe
The flaming Drake and the Nightcrowe make
mee musicke to my sorrowe.
While I doe sing &c.
Eight years later, released from Bedlam, he now wanders the streets, a mad beggar. Marrow=companion. Flaming drake=will-o'-wisp which was thought a mystical night spirit sent to mislead men. Nightcrowe=nightjar, a bird that makes a whirring sound at night and (I suppose) also a deceiver of men lost in the dark.

Verse 5
The palsie plagues my pulses
when I prigg yo' piggs or pullen
your cluvers take, or matchles make
your Chanticleare or sullen
This says that Tom is incapable of stealing. If he tries to steal he is stricken with the palsie and cant go through with it. He is harmless. Pullen=barnyard poultry. Culvers=pigeons. Matchles make=steal either the male or female of a pair. Chanticleare=rooster. Sullen=as Chanticleare is a fanciful name for a prize rooster so (I believe) Sullen is a fanciful name for a Barbary hen, probably the prize hen. That is my considered guess.
When I want provant with Humfrie
I sup and when benighted
I repose in Powles with waking soules
Yet never an affrighted.
But I doe sing &c:
To dine with Lord Humphrey meant to go hungary. Benighted=when the sun goes down. Powles=Paul's Church. Waking souls--probably the ghosts of the dead buried in Paul's Church who were probably considered benefical spirits. I suffer from a lack of knowledge about Paul's Church.

Verse 6
I knowe more than Apollo
for, oft, when hee ly's sleeping
I see the stars att bloudie warres
in the wounded welkin weeping,
Being mad Tom wanders at night. Apollo is the sun god and of course has no knowledge of the nighttime doing of the stars. The earth rotates and moves around the sun causing the night sky to change, prehaps suggesting "war" to stargazing poets. The "weeping" of the stars might be their slow "fall" (like tears drops) to the horizon.
The moone embrace her shepheard
and the queen of love her warryer,
while the first doth horne the star of morne:
and the next ye heavenly Farrier.
While I doe singe &c,
The shepherd is Endymion. The star of morn would be the planet Venus at morning and in Chaucer's "The Complaint of Mars" we find that Venus flees into "Cilenios tour" (Selene's tower--the moon's fortress). Venus flees between the "horns" of a partial moon (behind the moon). Gavin Douglas in his Prologue to Book XII of the Aeneid says--And Venus lost the bewte of hir e, Fleand eschamyt within Cylenyus cave;---calling the partial moon a cave rather than a fortress. (Such a literary reference suggests Tom was no ignorant peasant but well educated before going mad.)
Aphrodite (the queen of love) was married to Hephaestus (the Farrier), the god of forges and metal working but had a renown fling with Ares the god of war. Aphrodite "horns" (cuckolds) her husband Hephaestus by having a fling with Ares
Why "horn" came to mean "cuckold" needs an explanation. The middle English word "horen" and "orn" deriving from old French were similar in sound. "Horen" meant to behave like a whore and "orn" meant "an honor" (we still use the word ornament). So the phrase "your wife is a horen" and "you wife is a orn" sounded alike (the "h" sound not pronounced) but one meant "your wife is a whore" and the other meant "your wife is an honor (an ornament) to you (faithful)". Time passed and the phrase "to horn a man" came to mean to cuckold him (one supposes a man should feel honored to have a wife other men find so attractive) and the origins of the joke nearly lost (In "Love's Labor's Lost" Shakespeare demonstrates that he knew what the original joke was). In Tom O' Bedlam we see both of the early meanings of "horn". Aphrodite horns (horens, cuckolds) her husband Hephaestus and the moon horns (orns, honors) the morning star (Venus).

Verse 7
The Gipsie snap and Pedro
are none of Tom's Comradoes,
the punck I skorne, and the cutpusre sworn
And the roring boyes bravadoes,
"Gipsie snap and Pedro" are unfamilar to me. Gipsie would seem to be gypsy, snap was a name given by Rober Greene to one of the participants in a con game and Pedro is totally unknown to me. If I had to guess I would say these are other names for the con men Robert Greene describes in "Conney-Catching". Punck=punk=prostitute. Cutpurse sworn=denounced the cutpurse. roring boyes=loud intemperate young men.
The meeke the white the gentle
mee handle touch, and spare not
but those that crosse Tom Rynosseross
doe what the Panther dare not
Although I sing &c:
spare not=spar not (one thinks of the gates on toll roads) bar not, doesn't impede or get in the way of. (handle not, touch not and impede not) In the parlance of our time, Tom is not an aggressive panhandler. But Tom will defend himself against those that would have sport with him. Unless provoked he is gentle.

Verse 8
With an hoast of furious fancies
whereof I am comaunder,
with a burning spear, and a horse of aire,
to the wildernesse I wander.
Those in love turned poet. The poet was commander of his poetic fancies and had a burning spear (his pen) and a horse of air (Pegasus). And traditionally poet were shepherds spending their time with the sheep in far fields.
By a knight of ghostes and shadowes,
I sumon'd am to Tourney.
ten leagues beyond the wide worlds end
mee thinke it is no journey.
yet will I sing &c.
The knight is the angel of death. And this is a tourney to which all men are summoned. The tourney is judgment day which is beyond the world's end--it is of course no journey since you lie in a grave waiting for it.


ewrgall




[This message has been edited by ewrgall (edited February 10, 2002).]

[Clive Watkins]

Robert Graves has an invaluable essay on this poem, "Loving Mad Tom", written in 1927, in which he compares and discusses the extant versions of the text, describes its curious handling within the formal literary culture, offers his own reconstructions of two source texts and speculates interestingly about their authorship. In passing, he proposes glosses of some of the more puzzling or unfamiliar expressions, glosses which can usually be corroborated from other authorities, such as the OED. The essay was collected in "The Crowning Privilege" (London: Cassell, 1955) but may well be reprinted in "Some Speculations on Literature, History & Religion", a gathering of essays and lectures from throughout his life, published in the authoritative edition of his opus currently under way from Carcanet (Manchester, UK).

Clive Watkins

[ewrgall]

Clive,
Thanks very much. Actually I went to look for "Loving Mad Tom" and found it was in "The Common Asphodel" not "The Crowning Privilege". Obviously you were working from memory. I have edited my post and now use the Giles Earle version that Graves prints in his essay.

Graves does say some interesting things but some of his glosses are just plain wrong. The OED gives other definitions than the ones he chooses.

He speculates if Shakespeare could have wrote this song and (as he states) there were many great writers back then who could have written it. But interestingly Tom makes a legal joke which was Shakespeare's forte. (See verse 4--I just figured it out and added it above.) If I get the time to work on this thing I will add or change my original post.

If this type of thing interest you, you might want to look at my post on Sonnet 107. Thank again. You did me a real favor in that I was working off an edited version I found in the Oxford Book Of Light Verse (1938 by Auden).

ewrgall

[Clive Watkins]

Dear Ewrgall

About "The Common Asphodel", you are right. That collection was reprinted in "The Crowning Privilege" (1959), however. Looking across from the keyboard at my copy of the latter, I picked up the wrong date from the title page, for which I apologise.

In fact, several (though, as I noted, not all) of Graves’s glosses are supported by the OED. Certainly, others may well be rather more idiosyncratic.

On legal jokes, these were of course by no means a speciality only of Shakespeare in that period. They can be found in many other writers, too. (I write as a one-time lawyer!)

Good luck with your project!

Clive Watkins

[ewrgall]

In fact, several (though, as I noted, not all) of Graves’s glosses are supported by the OED. Certainly, others may well be rather more idiosyncratic.

Im sorry, I did not make myself clear in what I meant. Some of the definitions for words that Grave's uses can be found in the OED but those words have multiple definitions listed. Out of a number of OED possibilities Grave chooses the wrong ones.

Thankyou again for your help.

ewrgall

[This message has been edited by ewrgall (edited May 24, 2001).]

[Nigel Holt]

Of thirty bare yeares have I
twice twenty bin enraged,
& of forty bin three tymes fifteen
In durance soundlie caged,

I would say that this is based on the "Three score years and ten", and then calculations can be made from that.

70 - 30 = 40 - but this seems to be how long enraged rather than his real age

45 is his actual age - reminiscent here of the Old English kenning - woruld-cage - ribcage

So he's been alive for forty-five years but enraged(?) for forty. Maybe he means aware or even sexually aware?

Nigel

[ewrgall]

Of thirty bare yeares have I
twice twenty bin enraged,
& of forty bin three tymes fifteen
In durance soundlie caged,

Nigel,

I came up with a solution (right or wrong) that seems to make sense. I have included it above in my original post.

ewrgall

[Clive Watkins]

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

[ewrgall]

Clive,

Thanks for the imput. This is a short note to tell you that I cant reply more fully right now but in a few days will be able to get back to you on this.

ewrgall

[ewrgall]

Clive,

I am going to answer a few things today but will have to come back to this another day to comment fully on your comments. I will simply add to this reply as I get the time. What I skip over I am only temporarily ignoring.

"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 quite agree

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".
This and the next question need to be answered together. see below.
"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.
My explanation in my post was very poor. Reading those sections of "Tom 'O Bedlam" I recognized a "proverbial story"--an often told tale--a young man reaches his majority recieves his inheritence, goes on a spree becoming infatuated with a whore, she takes him for everything he has got, dumps him and he winds up in debter's prison. In my casual readings of 16th century literature I have come across that tale a couple of times. I recognized that "Tom's tale" was really that same tale being told as a riddle. Tom's original audience would be familar with his "often told tale of morality" but we are not. It is not a tale we tell any more. It is not included in our list of "boy meets girl" stories that our own modern literature repeats over and over again. BUT A 16TH CENTURY AUDIENCE WOULDNT NEED ALL THE FACTS TO GET THE MESSAGE--THEY ALREADY KNEW THE STORY AND COULD FILL IN THE BLANKS. Since I knew the tale I knew how old Tom was when he got his inheritencd--21, then add the proverbial year long spree and that takes him to 22. If he is now thirty then he has been in prison 8 years--3/15 of 40 equals 8----30-8=22. The arithmitic works out. It makes sense in terms of the proverbial story.

The "twice twenty" is a little more difficult--I have decided that it a hyperbolic phrase and has no arithmetical significance. "Twice twenty enraged" means "completely mad" or "hugely mad" "mad to the greatest extent possible" "twice twenty times mad". The other alternative is that it does mean 2/20 of 30 or three years mad---The meaning of the whole stanza being that Tom got tossed into debter's prison at the age of 22, served a total of 8 years but after the first five years the horrendous conditions of prison drove him mad--he was mad only for the last 3 years of his prison term. This makes a certain sense since madmen, after a time were set free from prison while debters were kept till they payed their debts--as I understand it--but the prison system back then is something I have an incomplete knowledge of so I could be wrong.

"Twice twenty" and "forty" of the next line are actually unconnected in meaning. Solving the riddle requires that you "not" connect them. A riddle is designed to confuse but be perfectly clear once you get the solution.

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.)

Having a "bowl of cockle pottage" at a "stew" meant going to a whorehouse and fucking a whore. That I am absolutely sure of. "A thing thus tall" I am still not sure of.I now have a possible solution for the line "with a thing thus tall, skie blesse you all" which I will insert in my original post.


I suggest that "Conquest" here refers to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.
I believe my gloss in my post is 100% correct.

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,this means pigging out on food, glutonary Some maudlayne dronke, mourning loudly and hye"This means lusting after a whore, drunk on a whore, exactly Tom's condition--"With a thought I took for Maudline 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."This says that some people spend their time in taverns more out of "peer pressure" (because they want their friends to like them) than because they actually like to drink. Of course back in 1522 no one had yet coined the pharase "peer pressure" but they obviously had noted the behavior. If this is right, then the line means, "When I have shaved close the beard on my drunkard’s face".
Since Giles was writing down what he heard--I can go along with "souce" being "sow's". The line then means "when I have run through all my money". He cuts off his beard (wastes his resources) by acting like an unthinking appetite driven pig. He has been drunk not on wine but on sex. Drunk a horny barrel meant "was sexually obsessed and acted out his obsession totally like drinking an entire barrel of wine".

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". I was just trying "oakum" to see how it looked and to see if anyone commented. An oaken inn was actually the stocks. I am of the opinion that no lawyer back then would have had difficulty with "a suit of gilt appariel". It was probably a common joke that died out when the law changed about debters. Lawyers just forgot it. They lost the background.

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 gave that some thought but decided for Apollo though it is pretty much of a toss-up. I have never read "Endimion" or Endimion and Phoebe" but when I get a chance I'll look at them and see if they contain a "deciding" factor.

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")?This is why I decided on Apollo. Apollo was the god of shepards and the stars sheep. The moon at morning was said to enter the arms of the sun. I am sure our understanding of this line will only increase as we play around with it.

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. I have been heading toward the conclusion that "Tom" has no one author but a couple. Graves thought that also--about the only thing he may have gotten right. But who knows what I will think six months from now. I dont. 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.Elizabethan writers didnt write "nonsense". Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle" is just a riddle (which I have solved--after going through a process similar to what I am doing now with "Tom"). Language puzzles were big back then.

As I said in an earlier message, "Good luck"!

I appreciate the imput. Thanks Clive.

ewrgall





[This message has been edited by ewrgall (edited June 19, 2001).]