Middle English lives

Abstract

Iohn Barton lyeth vnder here, Sometimes of London Citizen and Mercer, And lenet his wife, with their progenie, Beene turned to earth as ye may see, Friends free what so ye bee, Pray for vs we you pray, As you see vs in this degree, So shall you be another day So the sixteenth-century antiquary John Stow transcribed, in the London church of St Michael at Basinghall, the epitaph of a mercer who died in 1460. Perhaps composed for or by its subject before his death, as was often the case with medieval funerary verses, the epitaph reveals little about John Burton beyond his name, his livery company, and his immediate family connections: the bare outline of an apparently successful business and family life. Its essential point is the exemplary fact of Burton’s demise, and the inscription makes no attempt to recall individual features of his person or biography beyond those which point up most effectively the levelling power of death – to which mercers and citizens of London were as subject as any less exalted casual bystander. Here, as in most other Middle English funerary verses, the particularities of individual lives are flattened out into terse and exemplary generality.

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