Christis Kirk on the Green

"Christis Kirk on the Green" is an anonymous Middle Scots poem in 22 stanzas, now believed to have been written around the year 1500, giving a comic account of a brawl at a country fair.

It gave rise to a whole tradition of humorous poems on similar subjects by Scottish poets down the centuries, including Allan Ramsay and Robert Burns, and is still one of the most frequently published works in Middle Scots.

[4] The poet was certainly familiar with a tradition of Scots burlesque poems that included "Peblis to the Play" and the now-lost "Falkland on the Green", and he wrote for a sophisticated audience, or at least for one above the peasant level.

[13] Most modern commentators accept the tradition, first reported in print by William Tytler in 1783, that the Christ's Kirk of the poem is a ruined church in the parish of Leslie, near the village of Insch in Aberdeenshire.

[14][15] James Sibbald identified Christ's Kirk with the church of St. Salvator's College, St. Andrews, but, as with his authorship theory, this idea has found no supporters.

[16] Critics agree that the main virtues of the poem do not lie in subtlety of descriptive detail, nor in coherence of structure, but in a fast-paced excitement and wild comic verve that suggest comparison with Dutch peasant paintings.

[17] The exigencies of rhyme-scheme and alliteration that the poet faces are very rigorous, but he meets them with such inventiveness and apparent ease that it has been called a tour de force of mastery of technique.

Similar traces of the two older poems can be seen in the anonymous 16th-century "Rauf Coilyear", "The Cursing of Sir John Rowell" and "Symmie and his Bruder".