This narrative poem is found in the monumental and closely related Vernon and Simeon manuscripts (both dated c. 1390–1400), enormous collections of devotional poetry, romance, and other works, mainly in the vernacular; for a discussion of their contents see, in particular, the new facsimile edition Facsimile of the Vernon Manuscript, ed. Scase and Kennedy; and Scase, Making the Vernon Manuscript. The poem, like the rest of the Vernon Manuscript, is written in the West Midlands dialect, thus reminding us of the spread of deathrelated poetry through England.

The poem presents Death as having three trusty messengers: “Aventures” (literally “Adventure” but better translated in the sense of chance, diversion, fortune, or hazard), Sickness, and Old Age. Chance, the poem relates, steals people away like a thief in the night (lines 61–62), a description that, like many of the other works in this volume, uses the figure of the violent criminal to characterize the suddenness of Death’s approach. This thief, not choosy in his victims, steals a child that is but one day old (line 37–38), an image also seen in the Danse macabre and Lydgate’s Dance of Death. The poem compares the blithely unaware to a “foul in the lift” (bird in the air, line 98), playing on the notion of the dying person’s ephemeral beauty and fragility, as we also see in “A Mirror for Ladies at Their Toilet” (DIMEV 3454) and in “Warning Spoken by the Soul of a Dead Person” (DIMEV 3624). The second messenger, Sickness, treats the dying with greater honesty: Sickness “apertely” (line 73) announces Death’s approach, unlike his compatriot Chance who steals up unawares. Sickness also moves people to contrition, although the speaker sneers that such emotion is often shortlived once the illness is cured (lines 85–96). The poem thus critiques the hypocrisy of human religiosity when it flares up only in times of distress and emergency. Finally, Old Age, in the poem’s longest section, is characterized as a servant, forever at the gate and barred from entering into Death’s domain but pointing the way inside (lines 117–24). This detail is reminiscent of the metaphor for death in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, in which the Old Man is ever knocking “on the ground, which is [his] moodres gate” without ever being let in (CT VI[C] 729) and speaks to the broader significance of architectural motifs to the death poetry tradition. This section also elaborates the trope, familiar from the danse macabre tradition, of Death’s inevitability and relentlessness in going after people of all social ranks, including the pope and the emperor (lines 139–40).

The Old Age section brings a few more generic motifs into play that we have not seen as much in other works in this edition. It cites learned authorities — St. Paul and Augustine — to bolster its claims concerning death’s inevitability and the importance of repentance and briefly paraphrases St. Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” passage from 2 Corinthians 12:1–10 when discussing Sickness. The poem also features a brief ubi sunt moment concerning the passing of wealthy nobility that once amused themselves with hunting and hawking (lines 141–44), which we also see in “The Dawnce of Makabre” (DIMEV 4104). The poet goes on to present an Everyman figure at a churchyard, in which decorated tombs cover rotting bodies with wealth and finery. This stark image reminds the reader both of the physical presence of danse macabre imagery in churchyards, as well as of the vogue for transi tombs and their elaborate representation upon their valuable surfaces of the decomposing flesh within.

From here, the poem seamlessly moves into a brief vision of hell, which it chillingly and rather brilliantly imagines as a “pore halle” (line 157) with a low ceiling and close sides, filled with naked bodies, fittingly reminding us of a charnel house. Here the poem showcases some vivid turns of phrase, describing the dead as wrapped “in cloth of colde” (in a cloth of the chill of death, line 156) and highlights its characterization of hell as a cramped building by punning on the terms “helewowe” (end wall of a building) and “hell woe” (line 163). In this way, the poem builds up the architectural motifs introduced with the figure of Old Age as the servant at Death’s door. At this point, it also delves into the Signs of Death tradition, as it asserts the necessity of contemplating the visual spectacle of the body’s decomposition and consumption by maggots (lines 165–72). It thus also offers the mangled, rotting body as a paradoxical object of veneration and contemplation as we also see in “Warning Spoken by the Soul of a Dead Person” (DIMEV 3624).

This work is further enlivened by its macaronic quality: it intercalates two short Latin quatrains (lines 21–24, 89–92), which are roughly paraphrased in the English text in a manner reminiscent of Langland’s intercalation of Latin devotional verses and biblical citations, with vernacular translation and paraphrase, in Piers Plowman.

Manuscripts:

• Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a.1 (SC 3938) [Vernon MS], fols. 297vc–98rb (basis for this edition)

• London, British Library, MS Additional 22283 [Simeon MS], fols. 88vb–89ra

Editions:

• Horstmann, Carl, ed. “Nachträge zu den Legenden 5: The Messengers of Death.” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 79 (1887), 432–34.

• Furnivall, Frederick James, ed. “Of Þre Messagers of Deeth.” In The Minor Poems of the Vernon MS., Part II (with a few from the Digby MSS. 2 and 86). EETS o.s. 177. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1901. Pp. 443–48.

• Doyle, I. A., ed. The Vernon Manuscript. A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Eng. Poet.a.1, with an introduction by A.I. Doyle. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987. Fols. 297vc–98rb.

• Scase, Wendy, and Nick Kennedy, eds. A Facsimile Edition of the Vernon Manuscript: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. Poet. A. 1. Oxford: The Bodleian Library, 2011. Fols. 297vc–98rb.