This brief poem is written in Jesus 29 without any break from the preceding item, Signs of Death (art. 22). It is a sorrowful meditation on the soul’s precarious fate. The three woeful events are the certainty that one must enter the afterlife by dying; the uncertainty of knowing when; and the very dire uncertainty as to where one will go, to heaven or to hell. According to Louis, “This obviously popular tag relies on its easily memorable form and its effectively climactic structure. It is based on the popular Latin aphorism, ‘Sunt tria vere, quae faciunt me semper dolere’” (There are three truths that always make me sorrowful) (MWME, 9:3045; translation mine). Brown prints the Jesus 29 and Maidstone poems under the title Three Sorrowful Tidings, and two related poems under the title Three Sorrowful Things (pp. 18–19). See also Brown, pp. 172–73; Silverstein, p. 20; and Woolf, pp. 86–87.

Three Sorrowful Tidings belongs with several other aphoristic, mnemonic poems in Jesus 29, particularly Ten Abuses (art. 15) and its manuscript companion Signs of Death (art. 22), along with Will and Wit (art. 9), contributed by the Cotton MS. It is also closely associated with the next item in Jesus 29, The Proverbs of Alfred (art. 24), with which it also appears in the Maidstone manuscript. The three sorrowful tidings are named in The Proverbs of Alfred, lines 103–12.

[Fol. 189r. NIMEV 695 (see also 1615, 3711, 3712, 3713, 3969). DIMEV 1157. Louis, MWME, 9:3045, 3401 [394]. Quire: 4. Meter: 6 lines, rhyming in couplets, aa4. Layout: Art. 23 begins without any break from art. 22. Each line is punctated at the end. The second couplet (lines 3–4) is copied on a single line. Editions from MS Jesus 29: Morris, p. 101; Brown, pp. 19, 171–72; Silverstein, p. 20. Three other MSS: Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MS I.2.6, fol. 162va (Brown, p. 172); Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 258, fol. 134v (Heffernan, “Unpublished Middle English Verses,” p. 33); Maidstone, Kent, Maidstone Museum, MS A.13, fol. 243v (Brown, pp. 18, 171). Translation: Adamson, trans., A Treasury of Middle English Verse, p. 12. Seventeenth-century transcription: Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 120, pp. 601–17, by Welsh antiquary Edward Lluyd, Assistant Keeper (1683–1689) and Keeper (1691–1709) of the Ashmoleian Museum, Oxford (Hill-History, p. 203n1; and Hill-Part2, p. 276).]