John Skelton (1460-1529) was the last English poet of any note before the 19th century priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (Skelton was also a priest) to use alliterative stress verse, but his podics were idiosyncratic: he made lines of the hemistichs of Anglo-Saxon prosody, as in many nursery rhymes, but rhymed them insistently until he suddenly shifted to another rhyme. We have come to call this obsessive form Skeltonics, in his honor, or "tumbling verse."
Although Skelton was a priest, he was a highly unusual one who, among other things, evidently proclaimed himself the first Poet Laureate of England. He has been called the last of the English Medieval poets by some, and by others the first of the English Renaissance poets. No doubt he was both, for he wrote not only in podic prosody, like the anonymous English poets and balladeers since Chaucer, but in accentual-syllabic prosody as well, like the Scottish Chaucerians, Chaucer himself, and almost all other English poets up through the 19th century.
Skelton’s intention in this satire was not to say something deep, nor really to characterize the girl of the title who remains an abstraction rather than a person, but to make fun of his fellow clergy ("clerks" means clergy) who, unlike Skelton, were womanizers, for Skelton had a common-law wife and at least one child, for which he was punished by the Church. In the last stanza, Skelton may be asking his fellow priests to marry him to his “wife,” thus making his marriage “legal,” which they certainly would not be permitted to do, which is why Skelton’s marriage was of the common-law variety. Priests took the vow of celibacy, but not necessarily of chastity: the two terms are not synonyms, and Roman Catholic clergymen have seldom practiced the latter.
In this poem Skelton’s primary method was to use the music of the language to mock, for a good deal of the satire lies in the sounds of the poem, particularly in the refrain:
Aye, beshrew you, by my oath,
These wanton clerks are never loath!
Be off! Be off, my popinjay,
What, will ye do nothing but play?
Tilly vally, straw, let be I say!
Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!
With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.
By God, ye be a pretty toad,
And I love you a whole cart-load,
Straw, James Fodder, you play it shrewd,
I am no hackney for your rod:
Go watch a bull, your back is broad!
Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!
With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.
Surely you deal discourteously;
What, would ye frumple me? Now fie!
What, shall you be my piglet’s sty?
By Christ, ye shall not, not hardly:
You’ll not bejape me bodily!
Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!
With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.
Just walk away, you cost me naught;
Now I have found what I have sought:
The best cheap flesh that ever I bought.
Yet for His love that all hath wrought,
Wed me, or I’ll die at the thought.
Gup, Christian Clout, your breath is stale!
Go, Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale!
Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!
With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.
— John Skelton
This version is copyrighted by Lewis Turco 1973, 2011 and may not be reproduced anywhere for any reason without the written permission of the author.
