Lost English legend decoded, solving Chaucerian mystery and revealing a medieval preacher’s meme

A medieval literary puzzle which has stumped scholars, including M.R. James for 130 years has finally been solved. Cambridge scholars now believe the Song of Wade, a long-lost treasure of English culture, was a chivalric romance not a monster-filled epic. The discovery solves the most famous mystery in Chaucer’s writings and provides rare evidence of a medieval preacher referencing pop culture in a sermon.

The breakthrough, detailed in The Review of English Studies, involved working out that the manuscript refers to “wolves” not “elves,” as scholars previously assumed.

Dr. James Wade and Dr. Seb Falk, colleagues at Girton College, Cambridge, argue that the only surviving fragment of the “Song of Wade,” first discovered by M.R. James in Cambridge in 1896, has been “radically misunderstood” for the last 130 years.

“Changing elves to wolves makes a massive difference,” Seb Falk said. “It shifts this legend away from monsters and giants into the human battles of chivalric rivals.”

James Wade said, “It wasn’t clear why Chaucer mentioned Wade in the context of courtly intrigue. Our discovery makes much more sense of this.”

“Here we have a late-12th-century sermon deploying a meme from the hit romantic story of the day,” Seb Falk said. “This is very early evidence of a preacher weaving pop culture into a sermon to keep his audience hooked.”

“Many church leaders worried about the themes of chivalric romances—adultery, bloodshed, and other scandalous topics—so it’s surprising to see a preacher dropping such ‘adult content’ into a sermon,” said James Wade.

For the first time, the researchers have identified the great late-medieval writer Alexander Neckam (1157–1217) as the most likely author of the “Humiliamini” sermon. The 800-year-old document is part of MS 255, a Peterhouse Cambridge collection of medieval sermons.

Discoveries made 130 years apart

In 1896, M. R. James was looking through Latin sermons from Peterhouse’s library in Cambridge when he was surprised to find passages written in English. He consulted another Cambridge scholar, Israel Gollancz, and together they announced that these were verses from a lost 12th-century romantic poem which they called the “Song of Wade.” M. R. James promised further comment but this never came.

Nearly 130 years passed with no new evidence coming to light. Several scholars have attempted to work out the meaning of the sermon’s Wade quotation and speculated on what the full legend might have been like.

“Lots of very smart people have torn their hair out over the spelling, punctuation, literal translation, meaning, and context of a few lines of text,” said James Wade.

James Wade and Seb Falk argue that three words have been misread by scholars, because of misleading errors made by a scribe who transcribed the sermon. Most problematically, the letters “y” and “w” became muddled.

Correcting these and other errors transforms the translated text from: “Some are elves and some are adders; some are sprites that dwell by waters: there is no man, but Hildebrand only” to: “Thus they can say, with Wade: “Some are wolves and some are adders; Some are sea-snakes that dwell by the water. There is no man at all but Hildebrand.”

Hildebrand was Wade’s supposed father. While some folk-legends and epics refer to Hildebrand as a giant, if the Wade legend was a chivalric romance, as this study argues, Hildebrand was probably understood to be a normal man.

Chaucer and Wade

The Song of Wade was hugely popular throughout the Middle Ages. For several centuries, its central character remained a major romance hero, among other famous knights such as Lancelot and Gawain. Chaucer twice evoked Wade in the middle of this period, in the late 1300s, but these references have baffled generations of Chaucer scholars.

At a crucial moment in “Troilus and Criseyde,” Pandarus tells the “tale of Wade” to Criseyde after supper. Today’s study argues that the Wade legend served Pandarus because he not only needed to keep Criseyde around late, but also to stir her passions. By showing that Wade was a chivalric romance, Chaucer’s reference makes much more sense.

In “The Merchant’s Tale,” Chaucer’s main character, January, a 60-year-old knight, refers to Wade’s boat when arguing that it is better to marry young women than old. The fact that his audience would have understood the reference in the context of chivalric romance, rather than folk tales or epics, is significant, the researchers argue.

“This reveals a characteristically Chaucerian irony at the heart of his allusion to Wade’s boat,” said James Wade.

The sermon

To make sense of the fragment, the researchers gave more attention to the Humiliamini sermon in its entirety than scholars have previously.

“The sermon itself is really interesting,” said Seb Falk. “It’s a creative experiment at a critical moment when preachers were trying to make their sermons more accessible and captivating.”

“I once went to a wedding where the vicar, hoping to appeal to an audience who he figured didn’t often go to church, quoted the Black Eyed Peas’ song ‘Where is the Love?’ in an obvious attempt to seem cool. Our medieval preacher was trying something similar to grab attention and sound relevant.”

The sermon offers a lesson in humility, a central concern of medieval theologians, but does so in unusual ways. It focuses on a debased Adam and compares human behaviors to animal traits. It presents powerful men who become like wolves because they plunder what doesn’t belong to them. And it compares the actions of cunning, deceitful and rapacious people to those of adders or water-snakes.

“This sermon still resonates today,” James Wade says. “It warns that it’s us, humans, who pose the biggest threat, not monsters.”

The preacher brings in a second topical reference to underline this point, telling the story of a real-life knight and crusader named Hugh of Gournay, who switched sides four times between England and France. The story doesn’t appear in any other surviving source, but the way the preacher tells it, he must have known his listeners would recognize it.

“It’s a bold image,” said Seb Falk. “The repentant Hugh wrapping a noose around his neck and throwing himself on the mercy of the French king is a powerful and really fresh symbol of chivalric humility.”

The researchers noticed multiple similarities in the arguments and writing style of Alexander Neckam, leading them to believe that he probably wrote the sermon.

But whether Neckam himself or an acolyte, the author must have been familiar with Wade and confident that his intended audience would get the reference.

Seb Falk said, “This sermon demonstrates new scholarship, rhetorical sophistication, and inventiveness, and it has strategic aims. It’s the ideal vehicle for the Wade quotation which served an important purpose.”

Seb Falk is a scholar of medieval history and history of science. James Wade is a scholar of English literature from the Middle Ages forward. Both are Fellows at Girton College, Cambridge.