Contents - BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD - INDEX TO CHAPTERS - INDEX TO BIBLIOGRAPHIES - INDEX TO AUTHORS

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume II. The End of the Middle Ages.

XI. The Middle Scots Anthologies: Anonymous Verse and Early Prose

§ 4. Sym and his Brudir

Another example fo this type in Sym and his Brudir. It is, in intention, a good-humoured satire on church abuse, in a tale of two palmers in St. Andrews; but the adventures of these arrant beggars are on the same lines as those of the yokels in the pieces already discussed, and the appeal to the reader is identical. Here too, when the people come to the “brother’s” wedding—for

quhair that Symy levit in synnyng

His bruder wald haif ane bryd—

there is the like rough “justing,” wild chasing on horseback, dashing down in the dirt, and general noise. Even the literary setting at the end of the poem is deliebrately restless, for the poet, after describing how tge brother’s “mowth was schent” in the scrimmage, adds—

He endis the story with harme forlorne;

The nolt begowth till skatter

The ky ran startling to the corne.