The myth of Môt and ʼAlʼeyan Baʻal, who is Hadad, recounted in the texts unearthed at Ugarit, is a work of the schematizing imagination, and expressive of the ordered relations of natural phenomena conceived as embodied in gods. The systematic organization of the events in which the gods are caught, or which they dominate, shows that the myth arose from “observation of the great annual fluctuations of the seasons and a desire to explain them,” and that the authors or revisers, “brooding over the mystery of external nature,” sought “to lift the veil and explore the hidden springs that set the vast machine in motion.” We are well aware that “the civilized nations of western Asia and Egypt pictured to themselves the changes of the seasons, and particularly the annual growth and decay of vegetation, as episodes in the life of gods, whose mournful death and happy resurrection they celebrated with dramatic rites.” But in our texts we are introduced to subtle variations. Here the lapse, absorption and return of the rain are interfused with the regeneration and decline of plants in a rhythmic process to which no parallel is to be found among extant documents of similar purport and provenance. And the investigation of “nature's plan,” however cumbered with besotted notions, is so diligent as to bring the resulting depiction close to the twilight zone between mythology and the speculations of the early physical philosophers.

Thomas Underhill, a citizen of London during the Commonwealth, described that period of English history as “Hell Broke Loose.” Partly as a result of Anabaptist influence, and partly as a continuation of the indigenous Lollard movement, large numbers of persons in every part of England separated themselves from the Established Church and formed themselves into independent religious societies. Some of these groups were very eccentric in their beliefs and practices. Thomas Edwards, their bitter opponent, made a Catalogue of “the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies and Pernicious Practices … vented and acted in England” between the years 1642 and 1646, which he called, Gangraena. In it he distinguishes no less than two hundred and ten errors which were held by one or other of the sixteen groups into which he divides the sectaries. The sixteen were, “Independents, Brownists, Chiliasts or Millenaries, Antinomians, Anabaptists, Manifestarians or Arminians, Libertines, Familists, Enthusiasts, Seekers and Waiters, Perfectists, Socinians, Arians, Anti-Trinitarians, Anti-Scripturalists, Sceptics and Quietists.” The Parliamentary army especially abounded with men whose “great religion” was “liberty of conscience and liberty of preaching.” G. P. Gooch and others have shown how deeply the roots of modern democracy are embedded in the religious struggles of these seventeenth century sects. Most of them disappeared with the Commonwealth, or were absorbed in the rising Quaker movement, but certain fundamental principles for which they stood continued to exist and to mold public opinion.

The two poems which I shall here transcribe and discuss have been often noticed but never printed. They appear as additions in a fifteenth century hand to a version of the late fourteenth century treatise Poor Caitiff, preserved in MS. St. John's College, Cambridge, G. 28 (195), itself of the fifteenth century. Besides our two poems, which appear on the front fly leaves, the margins contain numerous scribbles in one or more sixteenth century hands. The manuscript possesses marks of ownership by one John Graunge, who also owned another fifteenth century collection containing such Latin pieces as Expositio Symboli, Peter of Blois's De Amicitia Christiana, Speculum St. Eadmundi, and Decretum Abbreviatum, now preserved in the same library. The donor of our manuscript was Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, who gave it to the College in 1635.