500-YEAR-OLD POEM FOUND.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 40, 16 February 1929, Page 16 (Supplement)

500-YEAR-OLD POEM FOUND.

EXPERTS EXCITED OVER IT. A poem which has been lost for nearly 500 years, and has never been published, shortly will come into the London auction rooms. It is a hitherto unknown fragment of the poem known to the antiquary Nicholas Brigham (d. 1558) as "Mum and Soothscgger," and dates from about 1425. Recently a furniture dealer at Bath sent a parcel of old books to Messrs. Hodgson's, the booksellers. Included was an MS. consisting of 19 leaves of parchment, on which was written in old English script a portion of an early 15th century alliterative poem. "Keep it, throw it away or burn it if it is of no use," was the instruction, but experts consider it to be one of the most interesting and important literary finds of recent years. "It belongs to the era of the Piers Plowman poems," said Mr. Hodgson, to a "London Daily Chronicle" representative, "and appears to be a continuation of the poem known as 'Richard the Redeless,' the incomplete but unique MS., of which is in the Cambridge Museum. "In our opinion, it should be kept in this country, the recovery of 1750 lines of English verse after a lapse of nearly five centuries being such a rare event."