Scottish Text Society publications > Third series > Ratis raving and other early Scots poems on morals

INTRODUCTION.
XXV11
The poem, as the name indicates, belongs to the type
known as “ How the good wife taught her daughter.”
Besides our texts, six other versions are preserved in
English MSS. and a seventh in an early print. These
are Lambeth 853 (c. 1430), Trin. Coll., Camb. (fifteenth or
sixteenth century), Ashburnham cxxx, previously
Loscombe (end of the fourteenth century), Emman. Coll.,
Camb. (fourteenth century), unprinted, but said to have
the same text as the preceding. A version from a MS.,
” reserved long in the studie of a Northfolke Gentleman,”
was printed by Robert Robinson for Robert Dexter in
1597 with the title The Northern Mother’s Blessing, and
is said by the printer to have been written “ nine years
before the death of Chaucer.” There is a version in
MS. Harlech, formerly Porkington 10 (? c. 1460), entitled
A Good Wyfe wold a pilgremage, and finally one in MS.
Ashmole 61 (late fifteenth century).1
Gibbs in his edition of The Northern Mother’s Blessing
mentioned in the footnote enumerates the different
versions, all except MS. Emman., and after some remarks
on the relation between the texts, gives on p. xxi a table
of correspondences between his own text and that of
Lambeth, Trinity, and Loscombe (— Ashburnham). These
four are in stanzas, and despite some variation in number
and deviation in order, the stanzas are in general agree¬
ment in content. The disagreements are no more than
might be expected in poems of such a nature, which were
in part perhaps set down from memory and in which the
scribe may have allowed himself a fairly free hand in
1 On these versions, see Wells, op. cit., pp. 380, 822, etc. Lamb. 853 is
printed in E.E.T.S. 32. 36 S., together with variants from Trin.; Ashb.
cxxx in Hazlitt, op. cit., I. 178 ff., and by Sir F. Madden (privately
in 1838). On MS. Emman., see Wells, p. 1064. The Northern Mother's
Blessing is reprinted in The History of the Most Noble Knight Plasidas,
edited for the Roxburghe Club by H. H. Gibbs in 1873. The versions
in Harlech and Ashm. are in E.E.T.S., E.S. 8. 39 ff. and 44 ff.