Wynnere and Wastoure

Wynnere and Wastoure ("Winner and Waster") is a fragmentary Middle English poem written in alliterative verse sometime around the middle of the 14th century.

The poem occurs in a single manuscript, British Library Additional MS. 31042, also called the London Thornton Manuscript. This manuscript was compiled in the mid-15th century by Robert Thornton, a member of the provincial landed gentry of Yorkshire, who seems to have made a collection of instructional, religious and other texts for the use of his family. It is not known where Thornton found the text of Wynnere and Wastoure, which has not survived in any other sources, but the dialect of the poem indicates that it most likely written by someone originating from the north Midlands.

The poem can be dated with some confidence due to its prominent reference to William Shareshull, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, who left the post in 1361 and died in 1370. It also appears to make reference to the Treason Act 1351 and the Statute of Labourers 1351; it is therefore generally thought to have been written sometime in the 1350s.

Wynnere and Wastoure is written in a four-stress unrhymed alliterative line, usually thought to be a late development, or perhaps revival, of the alliterative line used in Old English poetry.

(Rough translation: "But I shall tell you a tale that once happened to me / As I went in the west, wandering on my own / By a bank of a stream; bright was the sun / Under a beautiful wood by a pleasant meadow: / Many flowers unfolded where my foot stepped. / I laid my head on a bank beside a hawthorn / The thrushes vigorously competed in song / Woodpeckers hopped between the hazels / Barnacles struck their bills on bark, / The jay jangled on high, the birds chirped.")

Wynnere and Wastoure is the earliest datable poem of the so-called "Alliterative Revival", when the alliterative style re-emerged in Middle English. The sophistication and confidence of the poet's style, however, seems to indicate that poetry in the alliterative "long line" was already well established in Middle English by the time Wynnere and Wastoure was written.

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