An early medieval woman's love poem

Longing for someone this Valentine's Day? You wouldn't be the first...

Storks miniature from the Aberdeen bestiary, f. 49r. Poor frog.

An early medieval woman’s love poem

In 1931 a love poem was discovered on the back of an end leaf in an eleventh-century manuscript from Rochester, a copy of Ælfric’s Old English homilies. Medieval scribes charged with copying texts had to keep their goose feather quills sharp, and in this instance the scribe had used the end leaf of a manuscript to test their sharpened quill out before continuing. They wrote out a little verse, first in Latin, and then again in what appears to be Old Dutch with the influence of Old English. The poem reads as follows:

Habent omnes uolucres nidos inceptos nisi ego et tu quid expectamus nunc

Hebban olla uogala nestas hagunnan hinase hic enda thu uuat unbidan uue nu

All the birds have begun their nests

Except for me and you

What are we waiting for now?

The poem is brief, but the sentiment sweet and longing. It can be read either as a proposal: ‘shall we make a nest together then?’, or a lament: ‘why are we still apart?’. A thousand years after it was written down it still has the capacity to resonate with anyone who has been in love, making it the perfect subject for a Valentine’s Day newsletter.

What can we know about the person who composed these lines?

The manuscript likely came from a monastery, St Andrew’s Priory in Rochester (now Rochester Cathedral), and its discovery led historians to speculate about why a celibate monk might write such a poem. Kenneth Sisam, who discovered the poem in 1931, assumed that the verse was used to teach Latin in monastic schools. Moritz Schönfeld argued in 1933 that the poem was not about romantic love, but expressing a Flemish monk’s homesickness. In 1954, J M De Smet postulated that the poem was a monastic allegory - the birds are the monks, and the nest they are seeking is the spiritual home of the religious order.

These interpretations are rather unromantic, and largely unconvincing. A rose is a rose is a rose, and sometimes, a love poem is just a love poem. That doesn’t mean necessarily that this poem is evidence of a covert monastic love story - I may well idly jot down the words to ‘Baa baa black sheep’, but that doesn’t make me the composer of the rhyme, nor does it make me a shepherd. But someone must have composed this poem originally - who?

In 2005, historian Peter Dronke published a paper rethinking where this verse originated.¹ He argued that it shares similarities with other love-longing Latin poems. Crucially, these poems were written in a feminine voice. One, from the mid-eleventh century, expresses sentiments of birds building their nests amongst flowering branches, while the narrator reveals her loneliness. The similarities are enough for Dronke to conclude that the poem from Rochester could belong to this genre, and also have a feminine perspective.

Dronke poses an explanation for why a woman’s poem in Old Dutch might appear in an English monastic manuscript. William I’s wife Matilda was Flemish, and in the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066, many Flemish nobility settled in England. These nobles would place their young daughters in convents to be educated.

The Bishop of Rochester, Gundulf, appears to have been quite concerned about young women wanting to leave their convents to get married (i.e., make nests). He appealed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc, who declared that any young girl who had not yet taken her vows, or any woman who took refuge in a monastery during the chaos of the Norman Conquest, had the king’s permission to leave.

And so, as Dronke argues, the monks from St Andrew’s in Rochester may well have been appointed to teach these young Flemish girls - there was certainly opportunity for this verse to travel among the nuns and the monks in Rochester. The monk who wrote the poem into the manuscript may well have been aware of other similar Latin verses expressing female loneliness.

Dronke’s argument provides a plausible - though by no means certain - context for the composition of this verse. Perhaps it expressed the loneliness of a young lovelorn Flemish nun, placed in an English convent by her parents for her own safety, but longing to marry her true love. Perhaps not, but I like this interpretation.

1. Peter Dronke, ‘Latin and Vernacular Love-Lyrics: Rochester and St Augustine’s, Canterbury’, Revue Benedictine, 115, 2 (2005), pp. 400-10.

The poem is found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 340.