Like Caedmon’s Hymn, the Antiphon of Saint Thomas the Martyr in English is (by legend) of divine origin. It is reported that an apparition of monks in white robes taught it to Reginald, a priest of Wretham, Norfolk, and ordered him to sing it in veneration of Saint Thomas even before the archbishop was officially canonized in 1173 (three years after his martyrdom). The story is included in the Miracles of St. Thomas recorded by William, a monk of Canterbury who witnessed Thomas’s murder, so the antiphon and its origin-legend are of solid pedigree and early in date, although the two manuscripts of Antiphon (Jesus 29 and Winchester College, MS 4, which holds the legend) are each from the thirteenth century (Robertson, ed., Materials, 1:150–51; Brown, pp. 196–98). In the Winchester MS, Antiphon resides in an all-Latin context. Using it as an example, Hahn notes how such English lyrics “seem to have functioned as performance texts, inserted into sermons as audio enhancements to the more serious and systematic discourse of a homily, sound bites that captivated an audience’s attention by speaking their own language” (“Early Middle English,” p. 78). It is therefore of great interest that the Jesus 29 copy of Antiphon presents it as having a function within an all-English sequence.

In Jesus 29, Antiphon serves a specific purpose: it is the choral introit to the next item, On Serving Christ (art. 18), that is, an office sung for Saint Thomas to preface a homily on the martyr’s heroism. Antiphon’s final word, Euouae, indicates choral chanting. In addition to its musical setting, Antiphon’s language matters too. The incipit written in red to the right of the poem specifically names its chosen language because Thomas is a saint native to the English tongue. The key idea is that Saint Thomas will offer special intercession for whoever prays in English: he is a “help in Engelaunde” (line 7). By this formulation, linguistic identity stands for national identity, and “nation” as a concept is conjoined with an evangelical drive to see to the salvation of the English populace. Consequently, the paired presence of Antiphon and On Serving Christ outwardly expresses the religious-nationalist zeal that is often implicit in the lyrics of Jesus 29. Similar flashes of Englishness can be spotted in some poems preceding Antiphon: Ten Abuses (which quotes Bede) and A Little Sooth Sermon (brimming with the rhythms of parochial village life) (arts. 15, 16). The work that comes after On Serving Christ — Love Rune (art. 19) — includes a tribute to King Henry III. King Alfred is the vernacular font of wisdom in The Owl and the Nightingale and The Proverbs of Alfred (arts. 2, 24), and the former poem also names an English King Henry at line 1091 (see note). A political dimension is thus at play in the poetry of Jesus 29, and this aspect of the verse deserves more attention.

[Fol. 185v. NIMEV 1233. DIMEV 2047. Louis, MWME, 9:3041, 3399 [371]. Quire: 4. Meter: 10 lines, rhyming aabbccddee4. Layout: Written continuously as prose on five ruled lines, with punctuation at the end of each line. Editions from MS Jesus 29: Morris, p. 90; Brown, pp. 67, 196–98. One other MS: Winchester, Winchester College, MS 4, fol. 185v (Robertson, ed., Materials, 1:151; Brown, pp. 67, 196–98).]