Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/327

 MIRACLE CYCLES. 313 X : Mare, wife, thou wottes right well That I must all my trauayle teene, With men of might I can not mell That sittes so gay in furres fyne. 3 1 3~6 Here C and x agree in a remarkable inversion and in various minor points, x is f ar closer to the original than is C ; it retains ' thou wottes ' where C has c ye kno,' the whole of the second line which C alters, * can not ' where C has ' durst neyuer,' practically the whole of the last line. On the other hand C preserves the order of c mon I tyne ' (corrupted as ' many a tyme ') which x alters, that of ' can I ' (as ' durst I ') where x has ' I can,' and the personal pronoun in the last line where x has a relative. Obviously then x is not derived from C itself, but from a somewhat more original source, K, the readings of which can be pretty confidently restored thus : Mary, wife, thou wottes right well That all my trauayle mon I tyne, With men of might can I not mell They sit so gay in furres fyne. This passage well illustrates the relations in which C and x stand to the Y-W text. Although on the whole x takes from the original far less than C, and even transposes matter, what it takes it preserves in a far less altered form. The history of the texts has been discussed by Davidson and others, and it has been, I think, generally held that x at least came into being through oral borrowing. ' 1 See Craig, 'Two Coventry Plays,' pp. xxix, xxxiv. He credits Hohlfeld with this view ('Anglia,' xi. 264-5), but this