This work boasts an especially intriguing textual history and visual presentation. Of its eight stanzas, five come from Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, itself a translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium. Thus, lines 15–21 correspond to FP I.764–70; lines 29–35 to FP I.806–12; lines 36–42 to FP I.918–24; lines 43–49 to FP I.925–31; and lines 50–56 to FP I.960–66 (see Textual Notes for variants). This is one of several extracts from FP to circulate independently (see DIMEV 1904). In all three extant manuscripts, this poem precedes an extract on the ars moriendi from The Seven Points of True Love and Everlasting Wisdom, an early-mid-fifteenth century Middle English prose translation of a section of Henry Suso’s Horologium sapientiae (not to be confused with Hoccleve’s Lerne to Die, which is a verse translation of the same section of Suso’s Horologium).

The resulting text itself has an element of hybridity to it: stanzas 1–4 (lines 1–28), out of which only stanza 3 comes from FP, treat familiar themes from the death poetry tradition. The speaker, Death, emphasizes his own unrelenting and violent nature, noting that he is armed with a fearsome weapon (lines 8–9). In what seems like a twist on the Signs of Death theme, this poem’s Death points out that he scores his victims with a particular mark (line 11), as in “A Mirror for Ladies at Their Toilet” (DIMEV 3454, line 6). Like that poem, this work also addresses itself to a female who is emphatically young, fragile, and ephemeral in her beauty (lines 15–18) and whom Death menaces with a sharp weapon (lines 8–11). However, she is also presented in a relation with Death we have not seen before: she is his “hostesse” (line 1), welcoming Death into her own abode. By presenting the female addressee as Death’s hostess, Lydgate adduces an aura of both intimacy but also mutual obligation and social convention into the interaction between Death and the female addressee.

In addition to being characterized as a hostess, the female addressee is also presented as a book owner and perhaps even compiler, when Death mentions that she has “in [her] book . . . set [his] image” (line 2). This detail firstly speaks to the rise in female book ownership, especially of devotional material, in the fifteenth century (see, in particular, Erler, Women, Reading). It also bears on this work’s particular material context. Its earliest manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Douce 322, fol. 19v (dated 1450–75), features an ink drawing of a skeleton holding a spear and a bell, which matches Death’s description in lines 7–8. The image immediately prefaces the work, taking up thirteen lines of the 33-line text block. Enclosed in a double blue frame, the black-inked skeleton with brown ink shading looks away to the right as it stands on a grassy green surface, with a long spear with a red handle in its right hand and a large bell in the left, against a background decorated with red vegetal flourishes. The word death (variously spelled “dethe,” “deþe,” and “deþ”) is written 19 times in a thick black formata hand all around the skeleton, with a cluster of eight renditions of the word around the bell, as if the illustrator imagines the line “I my belle rynge” (line 7) as the word “death” coming out of the bell itself. Meanwhile, the spear emerges from the blue frame into the blank space between the folio’s dual-column layout, pointing to the word “declyneth” across the page (line 18). A similar presentation is found in London, British Library, MS Harley 1706, fol. 19v (dated 1475–1500). Here the image — comprising sixteen lines of the 40-line text block — is rendered more simply with no outline, or decorative background, and just a black line indicating the ground. The skeleton (also in black outline with brown shading) has been redrawn to match the stance of the figure in Douce; faint lines below the image show that originally the skeleton faced forward and held the spear at a sharper downward angle. There is no color besides red outlining for the handle of the spear and for the bell, and “deth” is written just five times in red in a circle around the skeletal figure. “Deth” is also added in black across the skeleton’s chest, identifying it as Death itself. As in Douce, the spear extends into the space between the text columns, here pointing to “dye of nature” in line 28. Thus, like the Dance of Death itself, the manuscript context of this work is also designed to function as an image-text.

Stanzas 5–8 of the poem, which are all taken from FP, demonstrate a marked shift in the work’s tone, moving away from the vivid personification of Death into a more standard devotional register of the ars moriendi tradition. Here the poem stresses the expulsion from Eden and Christ’s redemptive sacrifice in the context of preparing one’s soul for the afterlife through contrition and repentance. Thus, the hybrid work fuses two dominant strands of the late medieval death poetry tradition. This hybridity is underscored by the presence of a rubric in the Douce and Harley manuscripts, reading: “Thyese balades that thus ben wrytenne here be tak owte of the book of Johnne Lucas and sayde to the peple that shall see thys lytell tretyse in tyme to come.” Although it occurs in the middle of the work, the rubric seems to refer, by the phrase “[t]hyese balades,” both to the four stanzas preceding and the four stanzas following it. In the later Cambridge manuscript, however, produced 1475–1500, this rubric is omitted so that the works appear as a coherent whole.

Manuscripts:

• Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 322 (SC 21896), fols. 19vb–20ra (basis for this edition)

• London, British Library MS Harley 1706, fols. 19v–20r

• Cambridge, Cambridge University Library MS Ff.5.45, fols. 13r–14r

Editions:

• MacCracken, Henry Noble, ed. “Death’s Warning.” In The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Edited from all Available MSS., with an Attempt to Establish the Lydgate Canon. Part II: Secular Poems. EETS o.s. 192. London, Oxford University Press, 1934. Rpt. 1961: 2.655–57.