The Lost Song of Wade: Peterhouse 255 Revisited

Abstract

Short verses from the Song of Wade survive in an early-thirteenth-century sermon collection found in Cambridge, Peterhouse MS 255. They constitute the only known surviving fragment of a legendary romance that was widely known in medieval and renaissance England but now entirely lost. The fragment was first discovered by M.R. James and Israel Gollancz, and since then several scholars have considered the sermon’s English quotation to parse its meaning and speculate on what it says about the ‘Legend of Wade’. Despite such attention, there has been no sustained attempt to situate this fragment in the context of the sermon in which it appears. In this essay we return to Peterhouse MS 255 to re-consider them in light of the sermon in which they are quoted. We offer a new plain-sense meaning of the English fragment and suggest the most likely arrangement of its verse form, both of which animate a fundamental re-thinking of what glimpse these verses can give us into the world of a romance otherwise unknown, and into a lost legend as it was understood by readers and audiences in later medieval England, Geoffrey Chaucer among them. We provide an edition and translation of the full sermon, and analyse the sermon’s contents and composition, suggesting identifications for its sources, origins, and audiences. We also provide fresh analysis of the ways that preachers constructed their sermons, drawing from up-to-date natural philosophy and deploying memes from the world of romance and real-life chivalry.