The Jesus 29 version of The Proverbs of Alfred consists of twenty-three sections written as punctuated prose paragraphs by the scribe. After a two-section introduction, each section declares a nugget of proverbial truth — pious adage, good manners, social mores, or marital advice — ascribed to the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon king, a king to whom Henry III traced his ancestry (see Paris, The History of Saint Edward, trans. Fenster and Wogan-Browne, p. 12). What follows is a summary of the content by section:

1. Alfred was wise in law and in words, powerful, and loved God’s work.
2. Alfred spoke wise words to the people.
3. God is the supreme King.
4. A king must be intelligent and learned.
5. Nobles must judge justly; knights must keep order, defend land, keep peace.
6. Education is benefical; ignorance is not.
7. Wealth is worthless without wisdom and friends.
8. One’s situation can change for the better; God gives us our destiny.
9. Strive in youth to gain wealth for old age and for God.
10. Many expect long life, but only God knows when a death will occur.
11. Property is temporary and from God. Avoid pride over it.
12. Do not trust in wealth and gain God’s anger; it would be better not to have been born.
13. Wit and wisdom are better than wealth.
14. Keep sorrow to yourself; do not give an advantage to your enemy.
15. Marry a good wife; choose character over beauty.
16. Do not share private thoughts with your wife; she’ll disparage you before your enemies.
17. Choose and train a wife well. She should work hard; the husband should be her master.
18. Woman gives cold counsel. Do not listen to your wife, yet a good woman is a good thing.
19. Beware of false friends.
20. Shun bad habits. Instead, be beloved, acquire friends; thereby be fortunate and able to travel.
21. Everything is transitory, so follow Christ’s will, as Solomon counseled.
22. Do not blab everything before anyone; be discreet.
23. Teach your child good habits. He’ll be a comfort or a scourge in your old age.

The third to fifth sections of the Jesus 29 Proverbs establish the outlook on social order that one finds concisely stated in Ten Abuses (art. 15), and the final section treats the eighth abuse: “child unthewed.” According to this medieval model, good social order is hierarchical: God is supreme, king is next, and nobles and knights perform essential duties. The cultivation of wisdom and wit (treated as one noun) is also extremely important: education, literacy, and the application of one’s intelligence form the grounds of good governance (section 4) and, likewise, a good life (sections 6–7). Subsequent sections bring the advice to an individual level, offering wise moral guidance designed to bring about a fortunate life.

Compared to other English texts in Jesus 29, aside from The Owl and the Nightingale (art. 2), there is relatively little concern shown for the perils of the afterlife. The advice given in Proverbs is largely for the here and now. The last section is about one’s progeny being well taught, well behaved, and a comfort in one’s old age: “Wis child is / Fader blisse” (lines 296–97). “Blisse” does not here refer to heaven as it does in almost every other Jesus poem, but to pride in one’s family descendents. This aspect of Proverbs makes it more like the collection of English adages in Hending, found in MS Harley 2253, than like the hell-fire moralizing of The Saws of Saint Bede (art. 4), found in both Jesus 29 and Digby 86. Proverbs is also a very apt manuscript companion for The Owl and the Nightingale, where avian disputants copiously quote the “sayings” of “King Alfred,” although most of the proverbs they spout are not to be found in the Proverbs tradition.

Because its vocabulary is almost exclusively of direct Old English derivation, and because ancient letter-forms appear in some manuscripts, the date of Proverbs has been of great interest. The most recent assessment sets its composition in the twelfth century, but proposals have ranged from pre-Conquest to the mid-thirteenth century (South, ed., The Proverbs of Alfred Studied, p. 24). Ascription of the sayings to Alfred is by popular tradition not fact. As Hall notes, it “rests on no firmer ground than an affectionate remembrance of the great king as a sage and teacher of his people” (2:294).

The unusual meter of Proverbs strongly evokes an older Anglo-Saxon style: “The system is that of Layamon and the Bestiary; . . . a mixture of the national alliterative verse loosely constructed and rhyming couplets. The latter are bound together by perfect, imperfect, even inflectional rhymes, and assonances” (Hall, 2:292). Scholars have determined that the Jesus 29 copy of Proverbs is the youngest and most scribally-tampered copy to survive (Arngart, ed., The Proverbs of Alfred. II., p. 135; South, ed., The Proverbs of Alfred Studied, p. 23). The Jesus scribe sometimes tends to expand by adding new lines. Hall comments that a “poem of such loose structure readily lends itself to selection on the part of the copyist; and the scribe of MS. J was evidently a critic” (2:295; see also 2:293). But given the distance in time of all manuscripts from the original, no copy is flawless. Hall groups the “dilapidations wrought by the copyists” under six categories: 1) rejection of archaic and uncommon words; 2) modernization of older forms and constructions; 3) rearrangement of words, often into a prose order, spoiling rhyme and rhythm; 4) transposition of lines and parts of lines; 5) a free use of padding; and 6) distortion of rhymes by the substitution of alien dialectic forms (2:293–94). Reading Proverbs from any of its manuscripts requires, therefore, allowances as to meter, vocabulary, and rhythm.

Most of the editorial and critical apparatus surrounding The Proverbs of Alfred dates from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries and is little designed to welcome modern readers to the work. The text survives in two other manuscripts plus a third one now lost because of the fire in 1731 that destroyed a portion of the Cotton collection. Records of the MS Cotton Galba A.xix copy exist only in pre-1731 transcriptions of differing quality and completeness. On the early transcriptions and the manuscripts, see Hall, 2:285–87; Arngart, ed., The Proverbs of Alfred. II., pp. 11–37; South, ed., The Proverbs of Alfred Studied, pp. 3–11; and Arngart’s earlier study, The Proverbs of Alfred. I. (1942). Proverbs varies in every copy; sections differ in number and in order. The present edition, based on Jesus 29, does not provide comparative readings among the different manuscripts, only those among the different editions of the Jesus text. Many editions providing texts from the other manuscripts exist, and nearly every edition cited here prints two or more versions. For a good listing of editions, see DIMEV 714. The Cambridge manuscript, TCC, MS B.14.39, may be viewed digitally at https://mss-cat.trin.cam.ac.uk/Manuscript/B.14.39-40(Opens in a new tab or window).

Two matters of presentation in this edition require special notice. The first one regards meter and layout. In copying each section as punctuated prose, the Jesus scribe did not present Proverbs in a verse layout, only a loosely rhythmic one. While most editors (for example, Morris and Treharne) have set out the Jesus 29 Proverbs in uniformly short lines determined by scribal punctuation, I follow a method similar to that of Hall and sanctioned by the scribe’s copying of many long lines elsewhere: lines that alliterate are set as long lines with caesuras; lines that rhyme are set as short lines without caesuras. The second matter regards the placement of the tag “Thus queth Alvred.” By editorial convention, the tag heads each section, but, in fact, the Jesus scribe usually sets it at the end of a section. This manner — intoning “So says Alfred” at section-ends — mirrors the style of Hending, where every stanza closes in a proverb followed by “Quoth Hendyng” (CHMS, 3:220–37). The Jesus scribe’s section divisions are therefore preserved here.

For recent critical commentary on The Proverbs of Alfred, see Cannon, “Proverbs and the Wisdom of Literature”; and Yeager, From Lawmen to Plowmen, pp. 99–120.

[Fols. 189r–192r. NIMEV 433. DIMEV 714. Louis, MWME, 9:2974–75, 3358–60 [42]. Quires: 4–5. Meter: 318 lines, irregular rhyme, irregular alliteration, in sections of varying length. The style is that of late Old English, with some lines not alliterating, some rhyming. Layout: Twenty-three sections, each written as punctuated prose, headed with large colored initials. Editions from MS Jesus 29: Wright-Halliwell, 1:170–88; Morris, pp. 102–38; Skeat; Borgström, pp. 26–41; Hall, 1:18–28, 2:285–308; Arngart, ed., The Proverbs of Alfred. II., pp. 71–150; Treharne, pp. 443–55. Three other MSS: London, BL, MS Cotton Galba A.xix (lost by fire); Cambridge, TCC, MS B.14.39, fols. 85r–87v; Maidstone, Kent, Maidstone Museum, MS A.13, fol. 93r. Extracts from MS Jesus 29: Morris-Specimens, pp. 146–52, 332–33; Sisam and Sisam, eds., The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse, pp. 10–11 (section 7 only). Translations (based on TCC): Kemble, ed. and trans., The Dialogue of Salomon and Saturnus, pp. 225–48; Segar, trans., A Mediæval Anthology, pp. 127–32. 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).]