The Eleven Pains of Hell is the only trilingual item in Jesus 29. It is mainly an English account of the different, gradated pains of hell as recounted by a newly (and inexplicably) resurrected dead sinner who speaks to the Devil — as if he were not already the expert! — of what he saw and experienced in hell. The opening and closing lines form a framework in French, making Eleven Pains seem to address a French-speaking audience being treated to the novelty of English. It starts off like a debate, or wonder, that will be narrated in French with the combatants (Satan and the dead sinner) conversing in English. But French narration and any sense of debate evaporate when the soul’s account carries on for nearly three hundred lines. The description concludes in English, after the eleventh pain, with a sizeable stint of moralizing (lines 261–80), and then a French explicit: “Ke ces .xi. peynes escryvera; / Bon aventure ly avendra” (Here are written the eleven pains; / Have good fortune by it). It can hardly be said that a French narrator has returned, but the explicit does seem to encase the English poem in French.

But that is not the end of it, for in the Jesus 29 version there is an eight-line English epilogue after the French explicit, which asks the reader to pray for Hugh or Hugo (Hug’), evidently the scribe of Jesus 29 or an earlier copy. Hug’ then closes the whole poem with a Latin explicit: “Expliciunt .xj. pene inferni quas vidit beatus Paulus” (Here end the eleven pains of hell that Saint Paul saw). In content but not language, this second explicit matches the French incipit: “Ici comencent les unze peynes de enfern les queus Seynt Pool vist” (Here begin the eleven pains of hell that Saint Paul saw). The vernacularity of Eleven Pains seems, therefore, to have a strange level of embeddedness, English within French within Latin, as it was appropriated by different settings that prioritized different languages. A later copy of Eleven Pains found in Oxford, BodL, MS Digby 86 shares the French/English opening, but not the French/English/Latin close.

As the French incipit and Latin explicit indicate, the poem is a variation of the Vision of Saint Paul, a very popular legend that circulated in many languages. In that tradition, the non-sinner Saint Paul receives an eyewitness tour of hell led by Archangel Michael — a circumstance that makes more sense than an account given to Satan by a dead sinner. Robust English specimens of the tradition survive in the Vernon manuscript (Oxford, BodL, MS Eng. poet. A.1) and the Audelay manuscript (Oxford, BodL, MS Douce 302). For the text of Audelay’s poem (ca. 1426) and comment on both works, see Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. Fein, pp. 117–26, 269–73. As far apart as they are in time, several correspondences between Eleven Pains and Audelay’s Vision of Saint Paul are detectible: in both, the first four pains are burning trees, a hot furnace, a torturous wheel, and a foul river.

A favorite device of the Eleven Pains author is to express the incalculable extent of the pains through simile. In describing different circles, the dead sinner claims that the suffering souls number more than bees in a hive, or fish in the sea, or birds in the sky, or snowflakes in winter, or leaves on a tree. In one passage found in Digby 86 but not in Jesus 29, the sinners number more than the drops of wine in France! (See note to lines 219–32.) This particular rhetorical habit does not surface in any other Jesus 29 text. While it doubtless owes something to Latin models, its absence everywhere in the other poems of Jesus 29 suggests that Eleven Pains does not share authorship with other poems in the manuscript.

The following chart outlines the Eleven Pains as described in the Jesus/Digby poem. Line numbers are from the 290 lines of the Jesus poem and the 307 lines of the Digby poem.

Divisions between Pains are indicated by large initials in both manuscripts. Mostly they agree, but there are slight boundary differences for Pains 1, 3–5, 8–9. Each Pain is typically described as coming “further on,” as if one has embarked on a walking tour (as Saint Paul did). The final three Pains seem to descend deeper and deeper into a narrowing pit. There are a few apparent correspondences with Dante’s Inferno; for example, the pit with adders and snakes is like Inferno’s bolgia for thieves in Cantos 24–25 (ed. and trans. Musa, 1.226–45). What accounts for these is the fact that Dante’s is the later work with inspirations borrowed from the well-disseminated Vision of Saint Paul.

In its manuscript context — the sequence of English poems in Jesus 29 — The Eleven Pains of Hell stands as the finale of sorts. The real finale for the English poetry is A Homily on Sooth Love (art. 26). After it, a few other works, in French verse or Latin prose, appear before Eleven Pains, the last English text. In subject matter, however, this text obviously caps the broad sequence (viewed whole) in its own type of moral and devotional logic; it over-delivers on the message about the afterlife, begun piously with Christ’s Resurrection in The Passion of Jesus Christ (art. 1). After that work, the pains of hell awaiting sinners haunts the collection, appearing most prominently in Poema Morale (art. 3), lines 223–87, and the parade of hell-bound sinners in The Saws of Saint Bede (art. 4), lines 91–174. Eleven Pains is the endpoint for that thread — a fulsome demonstration of where Adam’s willfully delinquent children (as witnessed in A Little Sooth Sermon (art. 16)) will ultimately land.

The Digby version of Eleven Pains may be viewed digitally at https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_4426(Opens in a new tab or window).

[Fols. 198rb–200va. NIMEV 3828. DIMEV 6112. Foster, MWME, 2:452–53, 645–46 [320]. Quire: 5. Meter: 290 lines, rhyming in couplets, aa3–4, with some prefatory and closing lines in Anglo-Norman. Layout: Short lines written in two columns. Colored capitals (some enlarged) mark divisions of content (indicated in this edition by double spacing), except for three at the end. Lines 261, 282, 284 are not set off with colored initials; the separation of these lines is editorial, and based on shifts in content or language. Edition from MS Jesus 29: Morris, pp. 147–55. One other MS: Oxford, BodL, MS Digby 86, fols. 132r–134v (Horstmann, ed., “Nachträge zu den Legenden,” pp. 403–06).]