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| The King ligging eaten of Wormes. |
The most famous dance of death in England was painted on the walls of the cloister at St. Paul's Cathedral in London.
The author was the famous monk, John Lydgate, who had translated the text from a French original (Owte of the frensshe), which he had seen in Paris (And fro Paris / to Inglond hit sent). The danse that Lydgate had translated was the famous Danse Macabre in Cimetière des Innocents: (The whiche daunce / at seint Innocentis portreied is).
Lydgate was in Paris in 1426 - i.e. the year following the execution af the mural painting in Paris. This was during the 100 Years War when France was under English rule. Lydgate added 6 dancers: 4 women, a juror and a conjuror.
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| The Ellesmere manuscript. |
Stow ("A Survay of London", 1598) tells us, that the painting was destroyed: »In the year 1549, on the tenth of Aprill, the said Chapell by commaundement of the Duke of Summerset, was begun to bee pulled downe, with the whole Cloystrie, the daunce of Death, the Tombes, and monuments: so that nothing thereof was left, but the bare plot of ground....«.
Fortunately the Middle English text still survives in 12 different manuscripts, and in 1554 it was printed at the end of Tottel's edition of Lydgate's "Fall of Princes".
No trace of the painting survived, but by all accounts the pictures had followed the original in Paris. Stow writes: »About this Cloyster was artificially and richly painted the dance of Machabray, or dance of death, commonly called the dance of Pauls: the like whereof was painted about S. Innocents cloister at Paris in frāce.«. Therefore the text in this section has been illustrated with Guyot Marchant's woodcuts from Paris, 1485.
The text from the Ellesmere manuscript will be presented here and I will attempt to translate parts of it into modern English, but to paraphrase Lydgate:
Rude of langage / y was not borne yn Inglond
Haue me excused / my name is Martin Hagstrøm.
St. Paul's, London