"Richard the Redeless" and "Mum and the Sothsegger". James M. Dean

The literature of the estates of the world, so clearly developed in medieval France and England, was further enriched for the modern reader by the publication in 1936 of the fifteenth-century satire Mum and the Sothsegger. Discovered in the west country, near the locale of Piers Plowman, to which it bears a number of similarities, it reviews the condition of “all kinds of estates,“ from king to peasant, in the eventful last days of Richard II and the early years of the reign of Henry IV. Though a part of the newly discovered manuscript is a fragment of alliterative verse already published under the title Richard the Redeles, the much larger part concerning the case of Mum and the Truthteller was unknown to modern readers and seems to have been largely neglected since its publication. The question of the relation of the two fragments is unsettled, but since in the sixteenth century they were known as one poem under the title of Mum, Sothsegger, since their language and form are identical, and since certain ideas in the two parts are closely related, there is good reason for considering them here together as parts of a single poem.

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The Problem of Counsel in Mum and the Sothsegger

Studies in the Renaissance ◽

10.2307/2856960 ◽

1955 ◽

Vol 2 ◽

pp. 67-83 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Arthur B. Ferguson

Keyword(s):

Political Thought ◽

Members Of Parliament ◽

Mum And The Sothsegger ◽

Ideas And Institutions

The two verse fragments edited in 1936 under the title Mum and the Sothsegger have already proved useful to the historian of ideas and institutions. In 1939, Helen M. Cam made very good use of them to illustrate the relation of English members of parliament to their constituencies. More recently, Ruth Mohl, who followed the editors in considering them parts of a single poem, placed them in relation to the more formal aspects of medieval political thought. The usefulness of Mum and the Sothsegger has not, however, been exhausted. Indeed it remains, as both Miss Cam and Miss Mohl found it, a curiously neglected text. And one reason is that it has not been studied for what the author undoubtedly intended it to be, namely a substantial (if not closely knit) and only partially satirical commentary on the problem of counsel.

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The Dialect and Authorship of Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger

The Yearbook of Langland Studies ◽

10.1484/j.yls.2.302611 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 18 ◽

pp. 133-152 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Simon Horobin

Keyword(s):

Mum And The Sothsegger

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