I Syng of A Mayden - Origin

Origin

The manuscript in which the poem is found, (Sloane 2593, ff.10v-11) is held by the British Library, who date the work to c.1400 and speculate that the lyrics may have belonged to a wandering minstrel; other poems included in the manuscript include "I have a gentil cok", "Adam lay i-bowndyn" and two riddle songs – "A minstrel's begging song" and "I have a yong suster". The Chaucer scholar Joseph Glaser notes that 2593 contains the only surviving copies of several "indispensible" poems. These include the aforementioned poem "Adam lay i-bowndyn", "A Babe is born al of a may", "Benedicamus Domino" and "Lullay, myn lykyng".

In 1836, Thomas Wright suggested that, although his fellow antiquarian Joseph Ritson had dated the manuscript from the reign of Henry V of England (1387–1422), he personally felt that although "its greatest antiquity must be included within the fifteenth century", some lyrics contained within may be of an earlier origin. Wright speculated, on the basis of the dialect of Middle English, that the lyrics probably originated in Warwickshire, and suggested that a number of the songs were intended for use in mystery plays.

Although the Sloane Manuscript is the only surviving textual source, the bibliographer and Shakespearean scholar W. W. Greg proposed that the poem's similarity to a much earlier 13th-century poem held at Trinity College, Cambridge (MS. B. 13. 49) was unlikely to be accidental. Alan J. Fletcher, a specialist in Latin liturgical drama and the late Middle Ages, noted in 1978 that a set of contemporary sermons compiled by a writer called Selk (Bodleian MS Barlow 24) quote the final phrases of the poem in such a way to suggest the poem was more widely disseminated and known in its time:

Mayde, Wyff and Moder whas neure but ye

Wel may swych a ladye Goddys modyr be.