"Maiden in the mor lay" or "The Maid of the Moor" is a Middle English lyric of the early 14th century,[1] set to a melody which is now lost.
The literary historian Richard L. Greene called it "one of the most haunting lyrics of all the Middle Ages",[2] and Edith Sitwell thought it "a miracle of poetry".
The 14th-century bishop Richard de Ledrede's dissatisfaction with this song led to an alternative lyric for it being written, a Latin religious poem, Peperit virgo.
[8][9] "Maiden in the mor lay" has been transcribed into the manuscript in an abbreviated form which requires modern editors to reconstruct its full text.
[10] The poem was first published by Wilhelm Heuser in 1907 in the German academic journal Anglia, but came to wider attention when Kenneth Sisam included it in his 1921 anthology Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose and again when it appeared in W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson's Poets of the English Language (1950).
The manuscript's compiler, Richard de Ledrede, Bishop of Ossory, intended thereby to discourage clerics in his diocese from singing "songs that are lewd, secular, and associated with revelry".
[13][14] The stanza form of Peperit virgo will with only fairly slight adjustment match that of "Maiden in the mor lay", so that the Latin words could have been sung to the tune of the English lyric.
[5] On the other hand it has been argued that Richard de Ledrede's inclusion of "Maiden in the mor lay" among the lewd and secular songs that required new pious lyrics precludes any possibility of its being a religious poem.
She has been seen as a spirit of the well-spring connected with midsummer fertility rites known as "well-wakes", where perhaps "Maiden in the mor lay" was sung while one of the participants impersonated her in a dramatic dance or mime.
[27] As noted above, the music to which this lyric was set does not survive, though one modern edition, that of Dobson and Harrison,[28] prints it with the melody of the unrelated 13th-century song "Bryd on brere".
[29] In 1958 the film composer James Bernard published Three Mediaeval Poems, settings for unaccompanied chorus of "Maiden in the mor lay" along with the anonymous Falcon Carol and Chaucer's "Nowe welcome, Somor".
[30][31] Benjamin Britten's Sacred and Profane, first performed in 1975, is a work for vocal quintet or five-part chorus to eight Middle English texts, including the "Maiden".