Doomsday survives in four manuscripts, and in every one it prefaces Death, a longer poem in the same meter. In fact, the two moral exhortations seem barely differentiated from one another because there is never an incipit for the second poem and their layouts always match. One may infer, therefore, that a single poet produced both poems, as Brown asserts (p. 187). The manuscripts certainly present them as if this is the case.

In content, Doomsday evokes terror over the impending signs of doom, during which sinners will feel utterly helpless. The signs, which will begin on a Sunday evening, are an all-consuming fire, trumpets sounded by angels, and Christ’s appearance as judge. Mary will be there, but it will be too late to call out for mercy. And, unfortunately for living sinners, the Devil works to keep mankind blind and forestall their timely prayers. At the Judgment, Christ will speak kindly to the righteous, harshly to the sinful, and then consign each side to its respective reward or damnation; compare The Saws of Saint Bede (art. 4), lines 265–324. The poem ends with an exhortation to pray to Mary that she intercede on the petitioners’ behalf.

There is little substantial variation between the Jesus and Cotton texts of Doomsday: both have eleven stanzas in the same sequence. Eleven strophes also appear in the Cambridge manuscript, TCC, MS B.14.39, but stanzas 6 and 7 appear in reverse order. In the TCC version, the sight of Christ as Judge occupies the central seventh stanza; in Cotton/Jesus, the central moment is the sight of merciful Mary. The TCC reversal of stanzas 6 and 7 is also found in MS Digby 86, but because Digby has two unique stanzas appearing before the last one, this longest version also places Mary in the central stanza.

The extra stanzas in Digby simply reiterate the lesson that every living person sprung from Adam must repent, and they warn the reader to pray for mercy before “þe latemeste dai.” The insertion verbally connects to the first line of Death in Digby: “Þench of þe latemeste dai, hou we shulen fare” (Stengel, ed., Codicem manu scriptum Digby 86, p. 98, stanzas 39–41). In Digby, the sequence of Doomsday-Death is appended, with minimal sign of transition, to The Debate between the Body and the Soul, composed in a very similar meter. The conjoining of Debate, Doomsday, and Death appears to be the Digby scribe’s own creative operation (Brown, pp. 187–88; Fein, “The Middle English Poetry of MS Digby 86”).

All surviving copies of Doomsday present it in long lines. The Digby scribe joins stanzas with red tie-lines in the right margin. The TCC scribe denotes stanzas with left-margin paraphs and horizontal lines in the right margin. The Cotton scribe copies each stanza without line breaks (like prose), but with punctuation that matches the long-line copying found typically in Jesus 29. A capital marks the beginning of each stanza in both Cotton and Jesus. Morris prints the poem in 8-line stanzas despite the absence of internal rhymes. All three of the other versions of Doomsday may be viewed by digital facsimile. For TCC, MS B.14.39, see https://mss-cat.trin.cam.ac.uk/Manuscript/B.14.39-40(Opens in a new tab or window); for MS Digby 86, see https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_4426(Opens in a new tab or window); for MS Cotton Caligula A.ix, see http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Cotton_MS_Caligula_A_IX(Opens in a new tab or window).

[Fol. 182r–v. NIMEV 3967 (see also 3517). DIMEV 6339. Utley, MWME, 3:693–94, 850 [18(g)]. Quire: 4. Meter: 44 septenary lines in eleven 4-line stanzas, rhyming aaaa7. Layout: Long lines with medial and end punctuation. A colored capital marks the beginning of each 4-line stanza. Editions from MS Jesus 29: Morris, pp. 163–69; Reichl, pp. 408–14. Three other MSS: Oxford, BodL, MS Digby 86, fols. 197v–198r (Stengel, ed., Codicem manu scriptum Digby 86, pp. 96–98; Reichl, pp. 408–14); Cambridge, TCC, MS B.14.39, fol. 43r–v (Brown, pp. 42–44, 187–88; Reichl, pp. 408–14); London, BL, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix, fol. 246v (Wright, pp. 67–70; Morris, pp. 162–68; Brown, pp. 44–46, 187–88; Reichl, pp. 408–14).]