The Three Dead Kings, also known by its Latin title De Tribus Regibus Mortuis or as The Three Living and the Three Dead, is a 15th-century Middle English poem. It is found in the manuscript MS. Douce 302, and its authorship is sometimes attributed to a Shropshire priest, John Audelay. It is an extremely rare survival from a late genre of alliterative verse, also significant as the only English poetic retelling of a well-known memento mori current in mediaeval European church art.
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Famous quotes containing the words dead and/or kings:
“Hard-hearted minds relent and rigor’s tears abound,
And envy strangely rues his end, in whom no fault was found.
Knowledge her light hath lost, valor hath slain her knight,
Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world’s delight.”
—Fulke Greville (1554–1628)
“We have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down for the divine right of experts.”
—Harold MacMillan (1894–1986)