Thomas, Roman de Horn
England, c. 1170

University Library, Inc.5.E.2.2[2829], flyleaves
England? Early fourteenth century
Vellum, 198 x 133 mm (175 x 80 mm), 4 ff.

At the end of the Horn manuscript bound in with Denis the Carthusian’s Quatuor novissimus, a medieval reader has scribbled a lewd riddle in French couplets copied like prose:

Freit est de yver l’oree!
Un divinail vos ert mustrés …
En yver quant l’oree chaunge
Une verge crest estraunge:
Verge sanz verdour
Sanz foil et sanz four.
Quant vendra l’esté
La verge donc n’ert trouvé.

Red yat redeles, red what it my be? c’est un esclarcil, icicel en engleys. (Ed. E. G. W. Braunholtz, but with punctuation and the alternation of u and v standardised).

Cold is the winter wind!
A riddle will be presented to you …
In winter, when the wind changes
A strange stem grows:
A stem without greenery,
Without leaves and without branches.
When the summer comes,
The stem will not be found.

Read that riddle, and guess what it might be. It is an esclarcil, ‘icicle’ in English. (Transl. Alex Stuart).

The riddle is probably an abstract from Walter of Bibblesworth Tretiz (see the ‘Learning French in Late Medieval England’ theme).