A Fragmentary Version of a Harley Lyric

Like many of the lyrics in MS Harley 2253, 'The Labourers in the Vineyard' (DIMEV 4127) is not recorded elsewhere. 1It consists of five 12-line stanzas rhyming aab aab ccb ccb, i.e. two double triplets with the b-rhyme binding the stanza together.However, fragmentary remains of this lyric can be found at the end of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 327, on f. 218v, written in pencil and largely illegible. 2The main contents of the manuscript are sermons by a certain William de Mauli, in a hand which M R. James dates as late thirteenth century.James dates the pencil additions as 'xiii-xiv'. 3They are therefore probably older than the Harley copy of c. 1330-1340.The hand is thoroughly informal and sometimes difficult to make out even when not faded or erased.What survives, usually only partially, are the b-rhyme lines, usually preceded by a rough bracket linking the preceding couplet which is almost always entirely lost.Enough remains, however, to identify the text as 'The Labourers in the Vineyard', and to show that the surviving lines follow the order of the Harley lyric.The first legible line matches Harley l. 6.There are several more-or-less illegible lines above, where one might expect Harley l. 3 with its couplet, but nothing there seems to correspond (I think I can read 't ish', 'a discipul u').Following that the b-rhyme lines are recognizable variants of the Harley lyric up to l. 44, which does not appear to match; l.48 is illegible.There is space at the foot of the leaf for the final stanza, but it was either thoroughly erased or was never written.This stanza, as Brook notes (p.80), changes abruptly 'from narrative to the