Prick of Conscience

The Prick of Conscience is a Middle English poem dating from the first half of the fourteenth century promoting penitential reflection.

It is, in terms of the number of surviving manuscripts, the most popular poem written in English before print, with over 130 known copies.

The text is divided into seven sections: man's sinfulness, the transient nature of the world, death, purgatory, doomsday and its tokens, hell, and heaven.

[4] The Prick of Conscience's popularity can be judged from the fact that it survives in about 130 manuscripts – more than any other Old or Middle English poem.

[5] A wide range of churchmen and lay men and women owned or accessed manuscripts of the poem; Agnes Paston, a member of the family who produced the Paston Letters, is known to have borrowed a copy, from a burgess of Great Yarmouth.

pp 88–89 of Leeds University, Brotherton Library, BC MS 500 (Prick of Conscience). Catalogue record
Bottom central panel of the Prick of Conscience Window in All Saints Church, North Street, York, showing the second sign of doom: "þe seconde day þe see sall be so lawe as all men sall it see" (cf. "¶The secounde day hit shal be low / That unnethe men shul hitte knowe" in the main manuscript version, ll. 5.753-54).